











A MID-CENTURY CHILD 
AND 
HER BOOKS 





eine Oc 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO - DALLAS 
ATLANTA + SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CO., Limrtep 
LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 


THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lt, 
TORONTO 








S.G. GOODRICH de TO. BOSTON. 


From Perer Paruey’s TAes. 


$3 


A MID-CENTURY 
CHILD 
AND HER BOOKS 


By 
CAROLINE M. HEWINS 


Author of 
‘A Traveler’s Letters to Boys and Girls’’ 
**A Booklist for Boys and Girls’”’ 


—AIRGOA— 


Rew Bork 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1926 


All rights reserved 


) 


{3 


LOihnhinedschintsiinnnirtmsinsnitetG)S SG 


CopyricHutT, 1926, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 





Set up and electrotyped. 
Published November, 1926. 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
BY THE CORNWALL PRESS 


INTRODUCTION 


‘‘Ever since the Winter’s evening when I made 
my first acquaintance with that delightful 
place,’’ writes Anne Thackeray Ritchie in her 
introduction to Cranford, ‘‘it has seemed to me 
something of a visionary country home which I 
have visited all my life long (in spirit) for re- 
freshment and change of scene. I have been 
there in good company. ‘Thank you for your 
letter,’ Charlotte Bronté writes to Mrs. Gaskell. 
‘It was as pleasant as a quiet chat, as welcome 
as spring showers, as reviving as a friend’s visit; 
in short, it was very like a page of Cranford’.’’ 

The copy of Cranford from which I have 
quoted, with its delicately tinted drawings by 
Hugh Thomson, was a Christmas gift from Car- 
oline Hewins in one of the early years of a 
friendship singularly rich in intimate associa- 
tions with children and in the discovery of new 
and old books that children like. There is a like- 
ness between Lady Ritchie’s picture of Cranford 
and my own feeling for Miss Hewins’s office in 
the Hartford Public Library. No ‘‘lofty pleas- 
ure-dome in Xanadu’’ did she rear for her dear 
friends, the books of her choice, but with the 
touch of a born magician she transformed an 
ordinary library room into a spacious hall of 
enchantment worthy of the mid-century child 
who fell in love with The Alhambra at the age 


v 


vi INTRODUCTION 


of ten. At home anywhere in the world, in this 
enchanting room one finds Caroline Hewins 
nearest to all she loves best and no one, child 
or grown-up who has visited her there will ever 
be the same again. Miss Hewins may have been 
reading or writing at her desk, she may have 
’ been solving a problem requiring hours of patient 
research and a sure sense of the latest authori- 
tative statement, or again she may have been 
reading aloud,—the story of Persephone, if it 
was springtime,—or The Man of Snow, if it was 
near Christmas. Whatever she might be doing 
appeared in that setting quite the most fascinat- 
ing thing in the world. Here are the books of 
her childhood from which she has brought forth 
a package to share with the readers of this little 
book just as she has so often shared them with 
groups of librarians and their friends in distant 
cities and towns as well as in those of Connecti- 
eut. To hear Miss Hewins recite Peter’s Piper 
Alphabet is something to remember. ‘‘It is my 
one parlor trick’’ she remarked characteristically 
when asked to repeat it in the children’s room 
of the New York Public Library at the opening 
of the annual holiday exhibition of children’s 
books. Needless to say it called forth tumultuous 
applause and every one went away determined 
to learn it. Here at last it is bound up with hap- 
py recollections of a delightful childhood. 


ANNE CARROLL Moore. 
New York City, 
Hallowe’en, 1926. 


CONTENTS 


PART I 
: PAGE 
ere iemamiy ,- . fll klk lk ll ee! 


PART II 
ee eeee ee AD 





ILLUSTRATIONS 


Colored title-page from “Peter Parley’s Tales.” 
S. G. Goodrich & Co., Boston. . . . Frontispiece 


PAGE 
Title-page decoration from “Lilliput Levee.” Alex- 
ander Strahan, London, 18644... . 2 
The Pet. Frontispiece from “The Pairy Gift’ “ 
Edward Dunigan, New York. . . : 9 
Decoration from “Mother Goose’s ile Rhea: 
Old Style. McLoughlin Bros., New York. . . 15 


Title-page from facsimile edition of “Prince Dorus,” 

by Charles Lamb, first published by M. J. Godwin, 

Ree ere Le Rees tie eee he oa el ge OL 
Christmas Eve. From “Youth’s Keepsake,” Christ- 

mas and New Year’s Gift for Young People. 

William Crosby & Co., Boston, 1841... . 25 
Grandfather’s Wig, illustration in color from “Peter 

Perleye Tales.’ 8S. G. Goodrich & Co., 

POBLON ose is Me ewan es Fanny 28 
Long Measure. A page Fone oe Wonder’s “The 

Table Book.” McLoughlin Bros., New York. . 33 
Little Boy and Hoop. A Dee ban from “Grand- 

mamma’s Book of Rhymes for the Nursery.” 

William Crosby & Co., Boston, 1841 .. . 37 
A page from “The meee Alphabet,” found in ie 

Fairy Gift. Edward Dunigan, New York . .. 41 
Decoration from “Prince Dorus,” by Charles Lamb, 

first published by M. J. Godwin, London, 1811 . 48 


ix 


x ILLUSTRATIONS 


Illustration in color from “Gockel and Scratchfoot; 
or, The History of Two Little Chickens,’ by 
EMO SE pyre sea Ne os wi gn a CHE 

A page from “The Only True Mother Goose Melo- 
dies,” originally published in 1833 by Munroe & 
Francis ‘ 

Decorations from eHacchninty nN Traveanie Story,” 
by Jacob Abbott. Harner.é Broo, New York, 1850: 

“The Cocoa-man” il dv) By eeebeteceee 
“Old Polypod” . : 

Illustration in color from “The Man of guste: Ny He 
Harriet Myrtle .. . . . Facing 

Title-page from “uMiBemnadure Multiply ” James 
Miller, New York 

“Twice 1 are 2.” Another page aoe Monnens 
Multiply.” James Miller, New York 

Chiron and Jason from “Tanglewood Tales,” by 
Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ticknor & sli FORO, 
1852 

A page from “The Story of Little Knee For a Good 
Girl.” Philip J. Cozans, New York . 

Illustration in color from “Prince Dorus,” by Charles 
Lamb. M. J. Godwin, London, 1811. . Facing 

A page from “Rhymes for the Nursery.” G. W. 
Cottrell, Boston, 1837 . : 

Illustration from “The History of somes Gilpin” 
Daniel S. Durrie, Albany . 

Illustration from “The History of Gade; Two 
Shoes.” E. H. Pease & Co., Albany, 1852 . 

Illustration in color from “The Token,” edited by 
S. G. Goodrich. Carter & MHendee, Boston, 
1830. 4 A pal. tf Facwung 

Childhood. Illustration. fvoles “Briendship’s Offering 
and Winter’s Wreath.” William Jackson, New 
York, 1835 . WP 


PAGE 


52 


55 


97 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


The Spotted Deer. Frontispiece to “Snowberries,” 
by Alice Cary. Ticknor & Fields, Boston, 1867 
Decoration from “Grandmamma’s Book of Rhymes 
for the Nursery.” William Crosby & Co., Boston, 

1841 : 
Illustration in color ae “Jack a the Hee e ? 
Facing 
“T had a little hobbyhorse.” From “Mother Goose’s 
Nursery Rhymes,” Old ae, McLoughlin Bros., 
New York . ; 
“Ride away, ride away.” on “Mother Genet 
Nursery Rhymes,” Old a McLoughlin Bros., 
New York . ; as alta tie | ahs 


Illustrations from. see ‘Piper's Practical Princi- 
ples.” Facsimile edition, Grant Richards, London, 
1902: 

Andrew Airpump Pore 
Peewee OUOEIN, Fo ke Sk 
Jumping Jacky . aie ore 
384 SUS eS Se ae 





PART I 
THE CHILD HERSELF 





Title page decoration from 
Lititiput Levegr, 1864. 


A MID-CENTURY CHILD 
AND 
HER BOOKS 


PART I 
THE CHILD HERSELF 


_ Not every little girl lives in the house with 
a great-grandmother, a lively little old lady 
who played a very good game of whist, a 
grandmother, two aunts and an uncle, besides 
her father and mother. The great-grand- 
mother tried to teach me to knit when I was 
four years old, but the only result was a dis- 
taste for knitting which I have never been 
able to overcome. Perhaps it would have 
grown easier if she had continued the lessons, 
but she went to live with another daughter 
when we moved a few miles farther out of 
town. A great-aunt of ours lived on the other 
side of Boston, and it was an event to go to 
her house with our grandmother or one of our 

3 


4 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


aunts for a day’s visit in the summer vaca- 
tion, changing from steam-car to horse-car, 
waiting at Charlestown bridge for the schoon- 
ers to go through the draw, seeing the bright 
red lobsters in the little shops at each end 
of the bridge, and Bunker Hill monument 
towering up before us. It was nearly noon 
when we rang the door-bell and were greeted 
by her pleasant-faced maid, Joanna, who usu- 
ally told us that our aunt was out but would 
be in soon, and had left word for us to make 
ourselves at home. In a few minutes Joanna 
would come in with a large pitcher of lemon- 
ade and a loaf of sponge-cake, such as no one 
but aunt could make. She had a kitchen of 
her own with a Brussels carpet and her own 
special kitchen utensils, never touched by any- 
one else. After we had had all the sponge- 
cake and lemonade we could hold, there were 
always two books on the parlor table to look 
at, one of them “The Homes of American 
Authors,” the other a large edition of “Lalla 
Rookh,” which had one of the most fiendish 
pictures I ever saw, illustrating “The Veiled 
Prophet of Khorassan.’ By the time the 
thrills attendant on this had subsided our 
aunt would come home, delighted to see us. 


AND HER BOOKS 5 


It was not very long before early dinner 
was ready, and we were fed with delicious 
thick steak and water-melon, with the addi- 
tion of green peas for the elders. After dinner 
we walked on the graveled garden paths, 
which have always recalled to me the lines in 
“Q Mother dear, Jerusalem,” 


Thy gardens and thy goodly walks 
Continually are green. 


There was hardly time for a visit to a little 
- cousin across the street when we were called 
in to tea, and after that came leave-takings 
and the crown of the whole day to the two 
little sisters who were in the party, permission 
to go to the closed piano in the back parlor 
and choose whatever gift they liked best from 
those that covered the top. One was a small 
sugar bonnet, I remember, that lasted for 
years, and there were picture-books and games 
and all the things that children like best. I 
was too old for them, but one day when aunt 
gave me a dollar at parting I spent it on my 
way home for a copy of “Idylls of the King,” 
which I have yet. 

I was born in the old town of Roxbury, 
now a ward of Boston. The only thing that I 


6 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


know about my birthplace is that there was 
a pond with goldfish in the garden. The 
house was burned before I was old enough 
to be taken to see it. We left it before I was 
two years old and went to Jamaica Plains, 
two or three miles farther out. There we 
stayed for five years, and I remember the 
house and garden very well. The garden was 
large enough for old-fashioned flowers, core- 
opsis, mourning bride, hollyhocks, portulaca, 
larkspur, monkshood and the rest, the names 
of which I learned as a matter of course and 
have never forgotten. 

Then my father bought from Francis 
George Shaw, the father of Robert Gould 
Shaw, five acres of land in West Roxbury. 
There he liked to work on summer mornings 
and holidays. He had a blue smock, such 
as farmers used to wear, that covered him 
from head to foot and kept him from soiling 
his clothes. He planted trees of which there 
are one hundred and twenty left. One tree, 
an elm, was too large to move and remains 
where it was when the land was bought. A 
large, flowered magnolia was a great orna- 
ment to the garden which was planted after 
we moved to the new house. But an ever 


AND HER BOOKS 7 


green, over which a wistaria had run, was 
blown down by a severe gale and in its fall 
injured the magnolia seriously. The vege- 
table garden gave all that we could use and 
some for friends. In the pastures anemones 
bloomed on May Day, and within a short 
distance were hepaticas, not in large numbers 
but enough to give a few precious blossoms 
to flower lovers, who knew where to find 
them. An uncle of ours and one of his 
friends used to look for them every year, not 
together—for they lived several miles apart 
—but the first of the two to find the buds 
open always left his card there for the other. 
For years the pasture was full of fringed 
gentians in September and early October; but 
the winged seeds have a way of flying off to 
no one knows where, and one year there was 
not a plant to be seen. The next year, about 
a mile away, I happened to find a flourishing 
colony that probably sprang from the vagrant 
seeds, the descendants of which never came 
back. 

Beyond this pasture were woods with 
Indian pipe, wild indigo, partridge berries and 
flowers whose names we did not know. A 
little farther on was what we called The Lake 


8 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


of the Woods. It was dry in summer, but 
full in spring and fall, and we always con- 
nected it with Grimm’s “Tron Man,” half ex- 
pecting to see him come out of the water. 
In the swamp opposite there was a pond and 
a spring that flowed all winter and did not 
freeze solid, as was proved by a goldfish that 
came out of it in fine condition several months 
after he was put in. In the pasture our cow 
grazed. Her name was Jessie, which dates - 
her to 1858 when Frémont was candidate for 
President. I was induced to learn to milk 
by the gift of a small, orange pail, but my 
only effort showed that “Cushy cow, bonny” 
would not “let down her milk” for me and 
that the consequence would be a smaller yield 
even to grown-ups and experienced handlers 
of kine, therefore I was not invited to milk 
again. 

There were few entertainments for children 
in country villages at that time. One evening 
Signor Blitz with his wonderful talking dog, 
Bobby, and a troupe of trained canaries filled 
the by-no-means large Hall, and delighted 
every child there. After that, other “magi- 
clans’ came; but not one of them was as 
attractive as dear Signor Blitz. 


crate 





PET. 


a) 
j 


TH 


from Tue Fairy Girt 


1ECE 


isp 


Front 





A MID-CENTURY CHILD 11 


Children’s parties were simple and early, 
from two o’clock until six on Saturdays, in 
Sunday clothes, with games like ‘Pillow,’ 
“Post Office,” “Open the Gate as High as the 
Sky,” “Uncle Johnny’s Very Sick,” “Hunt the 
Squirrel through the Wood,” “I’ve Lost Him, 
I’ve Found Him,” which can all be played in a 
room without boisterous running about. Out- 
of-door picnics for schools were unheard of. 
Kissing games, which at that time were a 
matter of course at picnics for grown-up 
young folks, soon fell into disuse except in 
the back country. 

In the summer there were two days that 
we longed for, and remembered with great 
pleasure. One was a drive to Sharon, about 
fifteen miles and back, to visit a great-uncle 
and some cousins who lived in the old farm- 
house which had belonged to the family for 
a hundred years or more. It was a low, 
unpainted house with a gambrel roof, lilacs in 
the front yard, and a cheese room where we 
could follow the making from the curd to the 
finished product set away to ripen. Near 
the house was a pond where turtles sat sun- 
ning themselves on logs, and a pleasant walk 
through the woods around the edge of the 


12 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


pond, to where lady-slippers and checker- 
berries grew. On the way to Sharon we 
looked for the school children who stopped 
playing at recess to bow and curtsy to the 
strangers driving by, a mark of good manners 
which has unfortunately fallen into disuse 
in this country. It was sometimes dark before 
we were at home again, and I remember my 
first sight of a large number of fireflies danc- 
ing in a meadow, and recalled Drake’s: 


Through their clustering branches dark 

Glimmers and dies the fire-fly’s spark— 

Like starry twinkles that momently break 

Through the rifts of the aac tempest’s 
rack. 


The other summer holiday was in Milton, 
on the eastern side of Blue Hill, where there 
was another farmhouse near a pond. Huckle- 
berries grew there for anyone to pick, and 
we carried home all that we could use. Before 
we said good-by we had supper at a long 
table, flapjacks nearly as large as dinner plates 
with cider apple-sauce, which we never saw 
anywhere else. The old lady whose house we 
were in was a relation of our “Uncle John,” 
who was not related to us except by the mar- 


AND HER BOOKS 13 


riage of his brother to our aunt. He used 
to tell us of spending a winter there. One 
morning the fire was out, and he had to go 
half a mile to get a burning log to rekindle 
it. It was before matches were in general 
use. 

We learned to watch for shadbush in bloom 
when the shad came into the rivers, and once, 
without looking for them, I found calopogon 
and pogonia growing in a meadow. At another 
time by the banks of the Charles River 
I walked unexpectedly close to a tall bush 
of pink-purple flowers that I somehow knew 
as Emerson’s “fresh rhodora in the woods.” 
It was the only one I ever saw in Massachu- 
setts, but in Connecticut it is not at all un- 
common. A small plant with blossoms of the 
same color, the fringed polygala, grew near a 
brook in another woodsy place, to be looked 
for in May. The Fourth of July was the time 
to expect the white azalea and water lilies 
that grew near the river. Every month 
had its own wild flowers, up to November, 
when witch-hazel bloomed “like a gleam 
of pale sunshine’—as one nature-lover de- 
scribes it. 

Apple and pear time in the fall was always 


14 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


welcomed. We knew the names of the pears, 
Louise Bonne, Seckel, Beurre d’Anjou, Clapp’s 
Favorite, Beurre Bosc, Flemish Beauty and 
the rest that our father had planted. Some 
of the apple trees, Red Astrachan, Snow, 
Baldwin, Russet, Greening, were on the land 
when we bought it, and we helped in the pick- 
ing and the packing in barrels. 

The County Agricultural Society had a fair 
every September in a large building and 
grounds in Dedham. We all went, as a matter 
of course, and visited the spading contests, 
where a skillful Irishman, Dennis Doody by 
name, always came out at the head. Then 
we visited the horses and cattle, and ended 
in the hall where the vegetables, fruit, patch- 
work quilts and fancy-work were on exhibi- 
tion. In the afternoon there were horse races 
and, once certainly, a baseball game. I went 
to see it from school without luncheon, and 
distinguished myself by fainting in the hot 
sun. 

Of children of my own age I knew very 
little. One or two in the neighborhood used 
to come to play with me, and a cousin lived 
not far away. But, not going to school, I 
did not learn out-of-door games and had more © 


AND HER BOOKS 15 


spare time than if I had been in the school- 
room morning and afternoon. There were 
no kindergartens then on this side of the 





From 
Moruer Goose’s Nursery RHYMES 
Oup STYLE. 


Atlantic. If there had been, I should have 
known many things that I have never learned. 

It was in the early fifties that my mother 
taught me to read and spell. I do not re- 


16 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


member the process, but I have no knowledge 
of a time when the words in an ordinary 
printed book and the marriages, deaths and 
accidents in the Boston Evening Transcript 
were beyond my powers of pronouncing and 
understanding. “My First School Book” was 
the means of an easy and pleasant acquaint- 
ance with print. My copy disappeared long 
ago; but in a collection of school books within 
my reach is one much fresher and less used, 
from which I am able to renew my acquaint- 
ance with “The Disobedient Rabbit” and the 
two boys, one selfish and one generous, who 
had ninepence each to spend on Fourth of 
July. One ate up his very soon, but the other 
one proved his altruistic character by spend- 
ing half of his wealth for an orange to give 
to a sick friend. “Emerson’s First Part,” a 
simple little arithmetic, had pictures to be- 
guile young mathematicians along the diffi- 
cult paths of addition, subtraction, multipli- 
cation and division, with sometimes a short 
story like this: “When Nathaniel was sick, one 
of his schoolmates brought him four grapes, 
but his physician said that he must eat only 
one at a time. How many times could he 
eat one before they were all gone?” The 


AND HER BOOKS 17 


little book ended with the multiplication table 
up to twelve times twelve. I never saw after- 
ward an arithmetic for school use made en- 
ticing with pictures. 

There must have been picture books given 
me in my early days that went the way of 
most paper-covered books for children. I 
remember dimly one about a wood-cutter, but 
it was not Red Riding Hood. The pictures 
of that date were usually very crude, colored 
by hand with a generous bestowal of ver- 
milion, Prussian blue, gamboge and crimson 
lake that overflowed the edges of the chil- 
dren’s garments. A little earlier the colors 
were put on by boys and girls, each of whom 
was responsible for only one tint before pass- 
ing on a picture to the next in order. 

The school where my brother and I went 
was first in a large, sunny room in an old- 
fashioned house where an old lady, known 
as Aunt Electa, was kindness itself to the 
children, especially if they had fallen or had 
any of the various pains and aches that chil- 
dren have. After a year or two the school 
was moved to a small building farther away 
from the village street, and remained there 
until the teacher was married and went to 


18 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


Europe for a year before going to live in 
Boston. 

There was a little girl in the class above 
me who was a bookworm and had the run 
of two libraries, one a minister’s, the other 
the property of a leading Boston publisher. 
We came together like “halves of one dissev- 
ered world” and what one had not read the 
other had, from Miss Yonge’s “Daisy Chain” 
to Edgar Allan Poe. 

One day a pleasant white-haired man came 
to our house to sell some books he had writ- 
ten. His name was Warren Burton, and he 
was well known as a teacher until he retired. 
One of the books, “The District School as it 
Was,” was a favorite of mine and I lived over 
the life of the boys and girls in the little red 
schoolhouse, from three years old to the 
nearly grown-up pupils of the winter months, 
the teachers, from dear Mary Smith to the 
pompous or ineffective college students, and 
the champion speller who understood an order 
from the master to “go and spell Jonas’— 
who was splitting wood—to mean that he was 
to give him all the hard words in the spelling 
book and report on those he missed. An 
“exhibition” was a festive occasion to them, 


AND HER BOOKS 19 


with “pieces” spoken and, once in a while, a 
dialogue or a scene from a play enacted on a 
stage curtained with checked blankets and 
lighted by candles or oil lamps. 

This country school was of the late twenties 
or early thirties. Some improvements had 
been made in schoolhouses before 1850, but 
they had none of the luxuries of to-day. 
There were no swimming pools, gymnasiums, 
folk-dances, library books, luncheon counters, 
pianos, fire-drills, sewing, graduation presents, 
talks about books or pictures, celebrations of 
Christmas or other holidays, or manual train- 
ing. Children had less “homework” than they 
do now, and life was not as hurried. Country 
boys and girls had chores to do at home that 
kept them busy a part of out-of-school hours, 
and made them grow up under a sense of re- 
sponsibility. Girls had washing dishes, sweep- 
ing, dusting and keeping rooms in order; the 
boys shoveling snow, feeding horses, cows and 
poultry, and doing errands. In most-families 
the girls did a “stint” of sewing every day, 
and some of them cross-stitched the alphabet 
large and small, the figures up to ten, and 
their name and age in bright-colored wools 
on canvas, the elaborate and dismal samplers 


20 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


of years before having gone out of fashion. 
Their place was taken by slippers in cross- 
stitch and crocheted bags of twine for carry- 
ing luncheons and other school properties, in 
addition to a book or two. Sewing was not 
taught in country schools, and cooking was 
an unheard-of part of the curriculum. If a 
girl liked to cook there were opportunities 
for her in the home kitchen. 

One of my earliest remembrances is of sit- 
ting in front of a soft-coal fire and hearing 
“Flow gently, sweet Afton” sung. After I 
had learned to read, the singer, an aunt who 
died before I was six, must have shown me 
the song in her little fine-print, gilt-edged 
Burns with a black and gold cover, for I 
should hardly have found it for myself. 
There were a great many words in the book 
that I had never seen, but a glossary at the 
end told me what they meant and I read 
some of the poems over and over, till before 
I or anyone else knew what I was doing I 
was able to read Lowland Scotch easily, and 
never had to stumble over it in later years. 

I was about seven when I was taken to 
hear a trained orchestra and Camilla Urso, 
then a girl of fourteen or so, with braids of 


PRINCE Dorus 
ee, Sind 


WITH NINE COLOGRED ILLUSTRATIONS 
IN FACSIMILE 


INTRODUCTION BY 


ANDREW W. TUER, F.S.A. 





a 


1890-1. 
LONDON : 


The Leadenhal! Prefs, E.C. 


Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & €o., Lid: 
New York: Scribner & Welford, 7437 & 745, Broadway. 





An old title page. 





A MID-CENTURY CHILD 23 


hair down her back, who played the violin 
wonderfully. It was something to remember, 
everyone said. Applause, which I had never 
heard before, frightened me at first, until I 
understood what it was. There were no chil- 
dren’s concerts in those days, and I did not 
hear any great music again for several years. 

The first play that I remember seeing was 
“Cinderella,” though my impressions of it are 
fragmentary, chiefly of the fairies in spangled 
white and of Pedro’s funny tricks. The next 
play was “The Midsummer Night’s Dream,” 
which I did not read until after seeing it. 

In those days anyone who was on Boston 
Common on May Day could see groups of 
girls in white muslin, usually with a boy as 
King of the May. There must have been 
many colds and attacks of pneumonia for the 
rest of the month. The first May Day party 
that I ever went to was in the large parlor 
of a neighbor’s house. It was given for the 
hostess’s niece who had been ill the win- 
ter before, and had been promised a May 
party by her aunt if she would get well in 
time for it. A tall Maypole stood in the 
middle of the room, and every girl but one 
had a wreath of arbutus—she was a little older 


24 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


than the others and wore a wreath of pansies. 
I think that the boys had wreaths, but am 
not quite sure. I kept mine quite dry for 
several years. The party was over at sunset, 
and everyone went home happy. May par- 
ties were not uncommon, though a Massachu- 
setts May is, as Lowell said, “more like 
mayn’t.” The schools of to-day have found 
it wiser to crown their May Queens later in 
the month. 

At one of the simple afternoon parties a 
sea captain, whose home was in the neighbor- 
hood, and who had just landed from a long 
voyage, came in with something new and 
strange in his hand—a stereoscope and a few 
views at which we were all invited to look. 
The only one that I remember distinctly is 
Notre Dame. It was not long before we had 
a stereoscope of our own, with views of Tin- 
tern Abbey and other delightful places that 
were soon as familiar as if we had really seen 
them. 

In the early fifties Christmas trees were not 
common. Stockings were hung on Christmas 
Eve and filled with small presents, including 
candy animals; but the family celebration 
was later in the day. The first Christmas tree 











TMA 


«a 
re) 


HRI 


Cc 


1841. 


’3 KEEPSAKE, 


From YoutTH 





A MID-CENTURY CHILD 27 


that any of us ever saw was a hat-tree cov- 
ered with pine branches and hung with toys, 
books and whatever children would like best. 
Santa Claus came with it to distribute the 
gifts, though his call was short on account 
of the many homes that he had to visit. I 
remember that there were waiting for me a 
doll’s iron bedstead, with beautifully made 
sheets and blankets, a wax doll beautifully 
dressed, a gold pencil and a silver fruit-knife 
which I have to this day. 

One year, when I was twelve or thirteen, 
a family in the neighborhood persuaded a 
dancing teacher to open a class in the hall 
which was our only place for lectures, con- 
certs or dances. There were about a dozen 
girls to every boy. The teacher was a woman 
of mature years with carefully woven hair 
on each side of her face, a black silk gown, 
and very neat feet in black silk stockings 
and slippers. The Varsovienne, the Polka, 
Redowa and other dances of the period were 
taught us as well as the Lancers, other “square 
cotillions’ and some of the old-fashioned 
country dances. At the end of the quarter 
there was an exhibition in the evening when 
the girls all wore their prettiest dresses. Mine 


28 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


was a low-necked, sky-blue barége with a 
tucked skirt, a sash of the same color, and 
hot-house flowers at the back of my head. 

Adelina Patti was seventeen, I thirteen, 
when I listened for the first time to an opera, 
“Don Giovanni,” sung by the finest voice I 
have ever heard. Patti was lovely to look 
upon, and one of the papers said that when 
she danced with the tenor it was like an ele- 
phant turning round a gazelle. I never 
wished to hear her after her voice broke, and 
I have always remembered her as I heard her 
that Saturday afternoon in the Boston The- 
atre. 

In the middle of the century the Warren 
Street Chapel was much like the modern set- 
tlement. The Reverend Charles Francis Bar- 
nard made it a church for children, and gave 
them opportunities of seeing good pictures 
and statues. Because there were dancing 
classes in the chapel, he was known as “the 
dancing parson.” He formed the idea of en- 
gaging the Music Hall for May Day with an 
orchestra to play, and letting the children 
dance as much as they pleased. We used to 
go with a group of other girls, sometimes 
under the care of one mother, again with two 



































GRADDFATHERS WIG 


From Prrer Parury’s TAtes. 








1% rp te 
f 7 La) 
MP Sere’ ¥ AS iy 
7 " 
ba my aL 
F , 
. a 
: ’ 
{ 
; 
os 
a 
' 
> 





AND HER BOOKS 29 


or three. There were tableaux in a small hall 
on a lower floor, flowers and ice cream for 
sale, and it was altogether a very pleasant — 
day to remember. A remembrance of the 
Music Hall even earlier is of going to one of 
the horticultural exhibitions when I could 
not have been more than three or four years 
old. One of the party opened by mistake the 
door of a room where a committee of white- 
haired gentlemen was deciding on prizes for 
grapes and pears. I began to cry when no 
one offered me even a taste of one, and the 
door was hastily shut behind us. 
Schoolrooms of those days were bare and 
uninviting compared with their modern suc- 
cessors. Our high school was in a hall the 
use of which for town meetings gave us three 
days’ holidays, “one to make ready,” the sec- 
ond for the meeting and the third for clean- 
ing. On a raised platform on one side was a 
large glass case of apparatus used to illus- 
trate what is now called physics. There was 
not a photograph of any famous building, 
picture or statue in the room. Equipment 
was of the simplest and most meagre, but the 
teaching was so thorough that I have never 
forgetten Latin or French irregular verbs, and 


30 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


can read the two languages at sight as well 
as I ever could. 

My high-school diploma was given me, 
and then, because I was younger than the 
other graduates, and colleges for girls were in 
their infancy, it was a puzzle what to do with 
me next. The Girls’ High and Normal School, 
as it was called, in Boston was highly recom- — 
mended. I passed the examination on one 
of the rainiest days of my life, and was ad- 
mitted. It was not easy to adjust myself to 
the conditions there, in a class of sixty or 
seventy girls who had had public-school train- 
ing from the beginning; but I floundered 
along somehow and kept my head above 
water, although my marks were not high. 
The normal training was for the most part 
obtained by the Squeers method of substitut- 
ing in the schools where a teacher was ill or 
absent for any reason, and we had no lectures 
on pedagogy. 

Before long I began to make friends with 
a few girls who were lovers of literature, and 
they introduced me to “Water Babies,” ‘“Mar- 
jorie Fleming” and other books that have 
lived for more than half a century. The class 
had free discussion in the English literature 


AND HER BOOKS 31 


hours, and gained the habit of talking easily 
and to the point, though some views were 
original—to say the least. When we were 
reading Gray’s “Elegy” one of the girls in- 
sisted that “the little tyrant of the fields” was 
some small animal, like a weasel or a fox. 

Another habit, unusual in schools of that 
date, was connected with our study of his- 
tory. We had “date-books”’ in which we 
wrote from dictation brief histories of reigns, 
to be learned for the next lesson, in addition 
to a full account of an earlier reign from books 
at home, in the public library, the good 
school library or anywhere else. I read 
French more easily than most of the girls, 
and quite as often took the history of a reign 
from a book of that language on the school 
shelves as from histories in English. 

The “Elegy” followed Gray’s “Bard” and 
preceded “Hamlet,”’ which led to many long 
discussions over sentences and phrases not 
easy to understand. We had not much prac- 
tice in writing English. I cannot remember 
writing more than one theme, or “composi- 
tion,” as it was called in those days. A list 
of subjects was read aloud and the girls chose 
what they liked best or thought easiest, with- 


32 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


out consulting a teacher. When the teacher 
read the essays she went over her corrections 
or suggestions with every girl; but there was 
no practice in the use of words as there is now. 
The girls learned some things thoroughly, but 
could go through a four years’ course without 
any real training in the English that is now 
a favorite elective in college. 

The school year ended and most of the class 
began teaching in the graded schools. About 
a dozen stayed for the advanced year of lan- 
guages, psychology or mental philosophy as it 
was called then. There were one or two other 
studies which I have forgotten, except chem- 
istry, which nearly blew me up one day. The 
writing habit was encouraged by what were 
called ‘‘special exercises,’ when after weeks 
of hard work had brought forth a paper on 
some literary or scientific subject, the author 
or compiler was invited to read it in the school 
hall to an admiring audience from all the 
classes. 

The school had invitations to hear and see 
the favorite musicians of the time, one of 
whom—Teresa Carreho—was a child-wonder 
from South America who played remarkably 
on a grand piano in Music Hall. The schools 


Jin ' 
Zin - Jf 
SN. ~ Dyd. 
ip. 

I fur. 

im. 

IL. 


A NN yf : " deo. ' 
LEA Hil | Ideg 


ide tanges 
Mi if ngs 


f 


we EA If; 





\ AVS SAN 
ae Cs OL NN 
LONG er ae 


A page from Damp Wonpers’ THE Taste Boox. 





A MID-CENTURY CHILD 39 


gave a concert in the same hall for the officers 
of a Russian warship that was anchored at a 
Boston dock for a short time. In return they 
invited the schools to visit the ship on a speci- 
fied day. The school principals agreed that 
a general invitation would bring too great a 
crowd, and that it would be better to limit the 
guests to the graduating classes in the high 
schools. It was a cloudless day in late June 
or early July, for the summer vacation did 
not begin until after the middle of the month. 
The ship was spotless, and the officers were 
in equally immaculate uniforms. ‘There were 
flowers everywhere, and later a delicious 
luncheon was served. Some of the officers 
spoke excellent English, and those who did 
not made themselves understood by gestures 
or French phrases. The ship’s band played 
for dancing on deck. It was the first time 
that the girls had met foreign naval officers 
and they never forgot them. A member of 
one of the graduating classes and the most 
attractive girl in it was escorted home by her 
partner in the dance, and was an object of 
envy. Altogether, it was a delightful day and 
a pleasant ending to our school life. 

Our schoolhouse had once been a medical 


36 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


college—of some notoriety from the murder 
of Dr. Parkman by Dr. Webster and the dis- 
covery of his remains in the furnace by the 
janitor, who showed in evidence a set of false 
teeth identified by the dentist who made 
them. The basement and cellar were ghastly 
enough to be the scene of any crime. ‘The 
house was in Mason Street, just around the 
corner from West Street and the stately 
houses of Colonnade Row, at the window of 
one of which a white-haired gentleman used 
to sit, the youngest son of Paul Revere and 
the father of two sons killed in the Civil 
War. 

My grown-up library began with the first 
edition of Hawthorne’s “Marble Faun” and 
was soon increased by Longfellow’s “Golden 
Legend,” a blue and gold Tennyson and Jean 
Paul’s “Titan” in two thick volumes, which I 
have never found interesting. Palgrave’s 
“Golden Treasury” is a book that I bought 
at about the same time, and I never look at 
it without a feeling of thankfulness that I 
own it. Pope’s Homer and Wright’s Dante 
have Flaxman’s outlines to add to their inter- 
est, and I was familiar with the pictures in 
both before my high-school days. I had 


AND HER BOOKS 37 


had very little public-school training and was 
at a disadvantage in much of the new work, 
but an acquaintance with the Greek and 
Roman gods and goddesses and the Siege of 
Troy besides the habit of looking up subjects 
in the “Encyclopedia Britannica” kept me 
from absolute ignorance. I knew something 









_——— 


= “he SS 


From 
GRANDMAMMaA’s Book of RHYMES 
FoR THE Nursery, 1841. 


of great artists and their paintings. Pictures 
and statues with stories always appealed to 
me—such as Crawford’s Orpheus, Virgil and 
Dante meeting the Latin poets and the Schef- 
fer Dante and Beatrice. I knew the Flax- 
man outlines in the Wright translation of 
Dante, and also in Pope’s Homer, and the 


38 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


floating figures of Paolo and Francesca on the 
library wall of a Dante scholar. 

One-fourth of the boys in the High School, 
taken in alphabetical order, “spoke a piece” 
every Friday. The girls, although they 
mounted the platform to read what were then 
called ‘compositions,’ were not expected to 
repeat in public the poetry that they learned, 
but were permitted to say it at the noon hour 
or at other odd times to a teacher in the 
privacy of a class-room. In four years a girl 
could commit to memory and make her own 
forty poems she had herself selected, and of 
any length she pleased. In this way I learned 
many lines of Longfellow, Tennyson and 
Scott and some poems of Milton, Bryant and 
Whittier. One Christmas I was given a copy 
of “L’ Allegro,” illustrated and without notes, 
and I learned it by heart with the enjoyment 
which a girl who reads it for the first time in 
“College English” requirements where Cer- 
berus, the Styx, the Graces, May Day, the 
skylark, Queen Mab and Robin Goodfellow 
are supposedly unknown and carefully ex- 
plained, can never feel. 

In West Roxbury there had been a small 
library in a room leading out of “Betsy’s” 


AND HER BOOKS 39 


country store, where she sold a varied assort- 
ment of goods from molasses to calico. The 
library had been closed for many years, but at 
the beginning of my last year at school it was 
moved to a room not much larger, that was 
used, when necessary, for a dressing room at 
dances in the hall which it adjoined. This 
library was remarkably well chosen and had 
received many gifts from Theodore Parker 
during his ministry in the old white church 
not far away. It was kept alive by annual 
dollar subscriptions, and cared for by an old 
gentleman and his wife who were “uncle” and 
“aunty” to all the children in the neighbor- 
hood. They bought the books, prepared them 
for circulation, made the fires in the stove all 
through the winter months, repaired loose 
leaves and bindings and were at their posts 
every Monday for fifty weeks in the year. 
They gave their services freely, but after a 
while the circulation increased and an assist- 
ant was employed at twenty-five dollars a 
year, afterwards increased to fifty. Every- 
one in town regardless of church or political 
affiliations would help the library, and though 
the actual assets were not large judged by city 
standards, they meant a great deal to us. 


40 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


Various entertainments were given for it, 
fairs, suppers, a Dickens party, an exhibition 
of antiques, tableaux with negro spirituals 
sung between, led by a woman who had given 
years of service in the South Sea islands. 
When the librarian and his wife were on vaca- 
tion it fell to me, as secretary of the Library 
Association, to charge and discharge the books 
in a ledger under the names of the readers. 
The pleasure of knowing the library well 
enough to find books easily was increased by 
the treasures on the shelves, unnoticed by 
most of the readers, Ben Jonson, Leigh Hunt, 
George Sand’s “Consuelo” in the translation 
by Francis George Shaw and first published 
in the Brook Farm paper, the Harbinger, 
Carlyle’s translation of “Wilhelm Meister” 
and “German Romance,” with the eerie 
“Golden Jar,” some of Tieck’s fairy tales and 
Jean Paul’s “Quintus Fixlein.” An English 
neighbor who went home for a visit brought 
back a collection of three-volume novels for 
the library. They were received with some 
doubt and looked over carefully before they 
were admitted to the shelves, but I never 
heard any objections made to them, though 


§ Simon Sobersides, serious and soft, 
{T" Timothy Touchstone, tomboy and torch, 


U Uniform, Union, and Unicorn trot, 
W very vexatious his letters forgot. 





From Tue Farry Girt. 


a 
% 


‘ 


re 





A MID-CENTURY CHILD 43 


they were probably the work of second or 
third class authors. Some of the families in 
the town finally decided that the library 
would be more used in a more central posi- 
tion, and it was moved into a room a little 
larger than its former home, and made free 
to all the inhabitants of that part of the 
town—men, women and children. 

There was a reading club in our village 
after the free library opened, and once or 
twice in the winter the members used to im- 
personate the characters from some favorite 
author. Once we had a Mother Goose party, 
when one lady made a great success as: 


My mother’s maid, 

She stole oranges, I’m afraid, 

Some in her pocket and some in her sleeve; 
She stole oranges, I do believe. 


Wherever she was she dropped an orange. 
We had a great stuffed goose, though I can- 
not remember where we borrowed it. I was 
so worn out with reading notes of regret that 
I did not care what I stood for, and with a 
sad countenance and a dismal gown I an- 
swered the doorbell as “The maiden all for- 
lorn,’ which made some of the guests think 


44 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


that something serious had happened to one 
of the family. 

My twenty-first birthday was an unusual 
day for October, almost as warm as midsum- 
mer with nasturtiums untouched by frost, and 
cut in long trails to decorate the house for a © 
Dickens party. My father, as Mr. Wardle, 
received the guests the first part of the eve- 
ning, and later appeared as Alfred Jingle. I 
had asked not to have it entirely a young 
party and, on that account, the characters 
were played with much more spirit than if the 
parts had been taken by boys and girls. It 
made no difference whether they had ever met 
before or not. They recognized each other as 
kindred spirits. Captain Cuttle and Jack 
Bunsby brought down the house by dancing 
a “fore and after.’ Sairey Gamp did not 
know that Betsey Prig would be there but 
when they saw each other their only regret 
was that Mrs. Harris had not been invited. 
Dolly Varden and her mother were in eyvi- 
dence, Dolly with her hair elaborately dressed 
by a kind neighbor. Betsey Trotwood was 
there and the faithful Janet, Sam Weller and 
Bob Sawyer, Lizzie Hexam and the Doll’s 
Dressmaker, Mrs. Jarley and Little Nell. I 


AND HER BOOKS 45 


wish that we had kept a list of the charac- 
ters, for some of them have entirely gone from 
my memory. 

The next morning was dark and cold and 
rainy. The nasturtiums were all frost-bitten 
in the night. But the fun and unexpectedness 
of the party remained with all who were 
present. 





PART II 
HER BOOKS 





From Prince Dorvs, 1811. 


PART II 
HER BOOKS 


Looking back into the early fifties, I can 
see as plainly as any of the faces of family 
or friends the big, unwieldy, two-volume 
Froissart in a faded purplish binding with a 
gilt knight on horseback on the cover, and 
pictures of ladies in litters and processions of 
knights and soldiers that I loved to look at, 
and the fat one-volume edition of Gibbon in 
figure much like the author. Both books 
must have been too tall for the bookcase 
shelves, because they were on the table be- 
tween the front windows. In the room where 
they lived I was discovered one Sunday after- 
noon reading Godey’s Lady’s Book which, 
although extremely mild and harmless, was 
thought in those days a little grown-up for a 
person of four and a half. The next day I 
was taken into town and made the proud 
owner of a copy of Jacob Abbott’s “Lucy’s 

49 


50 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


Conversations,” my first bound book, which I 
have to this day, with my name and the date 
in it. It is in this book that Lucy has croup 
in the night and the next morning is given a 
powder in jelly and a roasted apple that was 
cooked by hanging it in front of the fire from 
a string held by a flatiron on the mantelpiece. 

The other Lucy books followed in due time, 
at intervals of a few months. Was there ever 
a more delightful journey than that which 
Lucy was invited to make to the seashore 
with her friend Marielle and Marielle’s 
mother, the mysterious Lady Jane who “‘came 
from some foreign country”? How grand it 
was for the little girls to travel in a carriage, 
to have tea by themselves in Lady Jane’s sis- 
ter’s library, waited on by a black serving man, 
and to look at drawers of curiosities, shells 
and minerals and a picture in mosaic of a 
burning mountain, by way of entertainment! 
“Lucy in the Mountains” is not nearly as im- 
pressive or awe-inspiring; but the stay at the 
General’s and his monthly inspection of 
everything in the house and farm buildings, 
ending with a round cake for every one of the 
children, lingers in my memory together with 
the “beautiful little apple pie’ in “Lucy’s 


AND HER BOOKS 51 


Stories” and other food described with the 
detail which Jacob Abbott knew children love. 
An American family as simple and happy was 
described in ‘“‘Clara’s Amusements” by Mrs. 
Anna Bache of Philadelphia, a descendant of 
Benjamin Franklin, who in her preface says 
that she has seen the plan of parents inter- 
esting themselves in their children’s recrea- 
tions “acted out with success in a family 
of small means and simple habits.” The 
children played Robinson Crusoe. Their 
father and mother told them about the French 
Revolution, showed them pictures of Robin 
Hood and King Alfred and taught them how 
to make scrapbooks, play games and guess 
riddles. They learned, too, from their 
mother’s example to be good neighbors and 
help her cook for a poor, sick woman, and to 
make her more comfortable. In all this there 
was no self-righteousness, but a perfectly 
natural and wholesome spirit. 

It could not have been long after this that 
Lane’s three-volume ‘Arabian Nights,” with 
Harvey’s illustrations, came to a shelf in the 
grown-up bookcase, not too high for small 
hands to reach. I did not read “Aladdin” or 
“The Forty Thieves” for several years, be- 


52 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


cause they were not in Lane’s edition, but long 
before I had ever seen or heard of them Sinbad 
the Sailor, the Flying Horse, Bedreddin Has- 
san, one-eyed calenders, dervishes, afrites, 
genii, gazelles and ghouls were as well known 
to me as the Mother Goose people or Lucy 
and her family. 

I have now two books that were given me 
for Christmas just after I was six years old. 
They have never lost their charm. One is 
“Gockel and Scratchfoot, or The History of 
Two Little Chickens’ from the German of 
G. Sus, published in a square octavo by Willis 
P. Hazard of Philadelphia, with full-page 
lithographs very well drawn and hand colored 
—the miller’s wife feeding her poultry, the 
visit of Scratchfoot to her aunt, the duck, and 
the triumphant return of the two lost chickens 
in a flower-decked basket carried by Henry 
and Christina, the brother and sister who had 
found them in the wood. Within a few years 
I have seen in a German bookseller’s cata- 
logue a picture of this author, Gustav Sus, 
with his two children. He was of the Diissel- 
dorf School, and an artist of some reputation 
as well as a story-teller and writer. 

The other book is “The Man of Snow” by 


09722? 
ape 


Ms 
> 


ES 

: es 

hy Nt . 
sem STS 

wn oe 





From GockrL AND SCRATCHFOOT, 
or, THe History or Two Litrte CHICKENS. 











AND HER BOOKS 53 


Harriet Myrtle (Mrs. Hugh Miller, wife of 
the geologist), one of 2 series of three, telling 
the simple, happy life of a family, father, 
mother and little girl, who go from London 
to live in a cottage in the country. “The 
Man of Snow” is the record of a joyous 
Christmas time, when the mother tells little 
Mary and her two boy cousins about the 
funny things that happened to a snow man 
when she was a child. 

Many of the picture books of the fifties 
were published in Albany by Sprague or by 
Fisk and Little, hand colored or rather hand 
daubed, and in pasteboard covers. The best 
of them all was “The Alderman’s Feast” be- 
cause it told so much about London. The 
city’s name is not mentioned in the book, but 
somehow I knew where to find Bow Church 
and the “yeomen so stout and tall, in scarlet 
and gold,” and I looked forward to the time 
when I should really see them. With the 
Aldermen and Dick Whittington for friends, 
what wonder that Bow Church was as familiar 
a building as the Boston State House? Be- 
sides, its bells were ringing in “Oranges and 
Lemons” in our Mother Goose, of which there 
were two editions that we learned by heart. 


o4 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


One was a reprint of the little square “only 
pure edition” first issued by Munroe and 
Francis in 1833 with wood cuts, many of them 
English, some with suggestions of Bewick and 
his school. The other was “Mother Goose in 
Hieroglyphics,” published by Appleton in 
1849, an auction copy, more tattered and torn 
than the man in “The House that Jack Built.” 
The poem runs thus: 


Robert (Barns) with (bellows) fine 
(Can) you (shoe) this (horse) of mine? 
Yes, good (Sir), that (I can) 

As (well) as any other (man), 


the words in parentheses being represented by 
pictures, easy to guess except “Sir,” who is a 
man in full armor with shield, lance and 
plumed helmet. The beginning of my ac- 
quaintance with Mother Goose was from this 
book. The other came later. The habit of 
guessing the pictures had always helped me 
in solving puzzles in magazines, in all kinds © 
of riddles and in digging out allusions. 

I know that my mother taught me to read 
out of “My First School Book” because I re- 
member the book afterward, but I have no 
idea how I learned the letters unless I picked 


There was an old woman tost up in a blanket, 
Seventy times as high as the moon, 

What she did there, I cannot tell you, 

But in her hand she carried a broom. 

Old woman, old woman, old-woman, said I, 

O whither, O whither, O whither so high ? 
To sweep the cobwebs from the sky, 

And I shall be back again by and by. 


Sm 
Shoe the horse, and shoe the mare, 
But let the little colt.go bare, 





A page from 
Tue Onty True Moruer Goose Me opis, 1833. 





A MID-CENTURY CHILD 57 


them up from blocks or, as one of the family 
did later, got them from the names blown in 
glass bottles. 

Back as far as I can remember any books 
I can see an old “AXsop’s Fables,” coverless 
and titleless, with long s’s and old wood cuts. 
It was Croxall’s translation into eighteenth 
century English with “applications,” not 
“morals” attached, which sometimes were as 
entertaining as the fables and the cuts. It 
is uncertain who the illustrator was, whether 
Kirkall or another, but Bewick followed him 
closely in his cuts for “Atsop.” The pictures 
of the gods and goddesses of Roman mythol- 
ogy in the sky, with Juno attended by her pea- 
cock, or the more homely scenes like “The 
Stag in the Ox-Stall” or “The Nurse and the 
Wolf” were as interesting to me as they were 
to the children of two or three generations 
before, who had read and owned the book. 
There is very plain English in the Fables, and 
words not now heard in the polite world are 
freely used, but I am sure that I was never the 
worse for them. 

Maria Edgeworth’s stories, prosaic as they 
seem to twentieth-century schoolgirls, are of 
a pleasant family life where mother, father 


58 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 























THE COCOA-MAN,. 


From Brecunut: A FRANCONIA Story, 1850. 


and children have the same interests. If the 
mother and father went to pay a visit the 
children went, too, and by this means met 
people worth knowing. The Edgeworths’ 
friends and family connections—the Wedg- 
woods, the Darwins and others—were all in 
advance of their time, inventors or men of 
science, and it is life with such families that 
Harry and Lucy, Frank and Rosamond knew. 
They always had something to do and to 


AND HER BOOKS 59 





OLD POLYPOD. 


From Breecunut: A FRANCONIA Story, 1850. 


think of—riddles, puzzles and nonsense. 
Their study of history was made real by 
games like “Contemporaries,” and they were 
taught to learn poetry and to connect it with 
history or science. 

Jacob Abbott’s “Rollo Books” and “Fran- 
conia Stories” are full of practical good sense 
in dealing with children and in suggesting 
occupations for them. One of these occupa- 
tions, letter writing, had an unexpected result 


60 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


when Phonny let his imagination run away 
with him in describing the supposed burning 
of his mother’s house and barn, and the let- 
ter was mailed by mistake, bringing Beech- 
nut home from Boston in the middle of a 
rainy night to find house and farm buildings 
in their usual condition. 

The ‘Aimwell” series, published in the 
fifties, had the same ideals of family life. The 
children and the older folks on a Vermont 
farm had a family paper, learned to guess 
riddles and puzzles, and played memory 
games. It was from one of these books and 
also from “My Favorite Picture Book,” a col- 
lection of pictures by Birket Foster, Harri- 
son Weir, “Phiz’ and other English illustra- 
tors, that I was once able to answer a request 
in the American Journal of Folklore for “The 
Peter Piper Alphabet,” and afterward to have 
a pleasant meeting with the family who asked 
for it. 

Lydia Maria Child, whose “Juvenile Miscel- 
lany” died about the time that the “Rollo 
Books” began, had republished many of her 
stories in ‘Flowers for Children.” In 1855 she 
issued her last book for them, although she 
wrote several stories for “Our Young Folks” 





Sal | 


Y WA 


Nee 
> 





























From Tue Man or Snow. 





AND HER BOOKS 61 


between 1865 and 1869. Her “New Flowers 
for Children” has one of her most charming 
tales, “The Royal Rosebud,” the story of the 
little princess, Edward IV’s youngest daugh- 
ter, whose mother in the troubled times after 
the king’s death, made her a nun as the safest 
way of disposing of her. Mrs. Child’s “Girls’ 
Own Book” taught me many games and 
riddles, English and French. Her “Frugal 
Housewife” was full of the industrious, thrifty 
New England spirit which, carried into her 
simple living, enabled her to give sums out of 
all proportion to her income to philanthropic 
societies. 

Translations from the German were in fash- 
ion at this time. It was through German that 
Mary Howitt had introduced Hans Andersen 
to English readers about 1845. Some of her 
translations, by no means exact, had been 
published by Wiley and Putnam in a little 
square book with colored illustrations in 
1847. It was in a gift book called “Christmas 
Roses” which belonged to Jenny across the 
street that I first read “Ole Luckoie,” ‘Little 
Ida’s Flowers” and “The Nightingale.” “Ole 
Luckoie” with its wonderful journeys under 
the umbrella of the Danish Sandman was the 


62 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


favorite, and there is no translation as good 
of one of the couplets which the lead pencil 
made for the doll’s wedding: 


Her skin it is made of a white kid glove, 
And on her he looks with an eye of love. 


It must have been two or three years after 
this, when it was an event for one’s father 
to go all the way to New York, that Jenny’s 
father brought her from there a fat, green- 
covered Andersen with the creepy ‘“Travelling 
Companion,” “The Little Red Shoes,” “The 
Little Mermaid” and all the other stories. 
She had another book, too, even fatter, that 
I tried to find for years and at last traced as 
“The Child’s Own Book,” published by Mun- 
roe and Francis. An advertisement at the end 
of “The Boys’ Story Book” issued in 1845 
says, “The tales have all their original beauty 
unimpaired; nothing changed except any vul- 
gar or improper expression unfit for the juve- 
nile reader.” How the titles “Griselda,” 
“Jack and the Beanstalk,’ “Peronella,”. 
“Riquet with the Tuft,’ “Fortunio,” even 
“Cinderella,” bring back the little pictures of 
beauteous ladies in short-waisted gowns, and 
the amateur dramatized versions of “Blue- - 


NEW YORE: 
JAMES MILLER, PUBLISHER. 





Title page from MarmapukKe MULTIPLY. 


s 1 
pad 
te 


be 


ft bas! 
xt de ae 
Punt, 





A MID-CENTURY CHILD 65 


beard” and “Fatal and Fortune” performed in 
the barn by some venerable persons of sixteen 
and eighteen before an admiring audience of 
fewer years! How the book recalls, too, the 
glorious Hall of Mirrors in “The Invisible 
Prince” and Bluet, the Princess’ cat, deprived 
of his food by the supposedly invisible Lean- 
dor in full sight of the audience, in all the 
beauty of his blue and silver doublet and 
white-plumed hat. 

Grimm’s Fairy Tales, although they were 
published in 1853 by C. 8. Francis in a very 
good two-volume translation with Wehnert’s 
illustrations, did not come into the house 
until nearly ten years later and stayed for 
only a short time, for the precious copy was 
sent by the owner, a younger sister, to the 
soldiers in the hospitals as the dearest thing 
she could give to her country. 

Munroe and Francis were the American 
publishers of “Marmaduke Multiply,” who 
made even the multiplication table amusing 
and easy to learn. Is it possible to forget 
“Five times twelve are sixty,” illustrated by 
a sour-faced woman picking her steps over a 
threshold and saying, “This house is like a 
pigsty,” or “Four times eight are thirty-two,” 


66 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


where a very fat, waddling person exclaims, 
“T once could dance as well as you,” or “Seven 
times eight are fifty-six,” where a boy is run- 
ning away after having broken the toy cart 
belonging to another who, instead of running 
after him and giving him what he deserves, 
is merely standing in a wooden attitude and 
saying, “That fellow merits twenty kicks’? 
“The Wonder Book” was on my pillow 
when I opened my eyes on the morning of my 
seventh birthday. The purple-covered “Tan- 
glewood Tales” with Proserpine and Europa, 
Theseus, Jason and Circe is still mine; but 
the dear green “Wonder Book” with the Ham- 
matt Billings pictures of the groups of chil- 
dren on Tanglewood porch, Perseus holding 
up the Gorgon’s head, King Midas, Pandora, 
the three Golden Apples, Baucis and Phile- 
mon and the Chimera vanished long years 
ago, and not even the Walter Crane or Max- 
field Parrish editions will ever take its place. 
I had read, skipping the moralizing, a little 
old ‘Robinson Crusoe” in the house, with yel- 
low paper and small type. But I never really 
loved it as I loved a book that was ‘brought 
me from New York about this time—“The 
Swiss Family Robinson”—their suggestive 


\ \\ 
\ 
' \ \\Y 
i \ 
i) t 


\ tf 
“i | i i 
\ i \" iy | i 
Ny \ f il 





Twice 1 are 2. 


This book is something: new. 





From MarMapduKE MULTIPLY. 





A MID-CENTURY CHILD 69 


makeshifts and picnicky ways of living in 
tent, tree and cavern, their pet monkey and 
all the fauna and flora of the remarkable 
island which combined the vegetation of the 
tropical and the temperate zones, and where 
everyone could do and find just the right 
thing in an emergency. 

Grace Greenwood (Sara Lippincott) had 
written “Recollections of My Childhood” and 
“History of My Pets” a few years before this 
time. The stories in the first are often senti- 
mental, but the account of her child life in 
western New York is most amusing. Her 
monthly paper, The Little Pilgrim, pub- 
lished in Philadelphia, came to me through 
the mail, and I had the pleasure of going to 
the post office to get it and of reading her 
stories of history and travel, which made 
Shakespeare, Scott and Byron, the royal pris- 
oner, James I of Scotland, Jane Beaufort and 
Catherine Douglas, Guy of Warwick and Sir 
Philip Sydney real living persons whose 
homes I looked forward to seeing some day. 

Shakespeare was not my “daily food,” but 
there were two books illustrated with the steel 
engravings of the time that led me to him. 
They were in the parlor where we sat on 


70 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


Sunday afternoons, and were an unfailing 
source of pleasure. One of them was a large 
edition of Mrs. Jameson’s “Characteristics of 
Women.” From the faces, sad like Ophelia, 
mirthful like Beatrice, frowning like Lady 
Macbeth, or merely pretty and meaningless 
like Perdita and Miranda, I began to read 
what the book had to say about them, and 
after a while the plays themselves. The only 
Shakespeare girls that I had ever seen— 
Helena and Hermia—were not in the “Char- 
acteristics’ at all. And when I saw them in 
“Midsummer Night’s Dream” they were over- 
shadowed by the clowns and the fairies. The 
other book, Allan Cunningham’s “Gallery of 
Pictures,” had some of the old Boydell prints 
—Reynolds’s Puck, Henry V before Honfleur, 
the Duke of Rutland, Kemble as Hamlet, 
Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and Hero and 
Ursula watching for Beatrice in the pleached 
bower. In that, or more probably in a port- 
folio of prints cut from magazines, were Anne 
Page and Slender and Christopher Sly in the 
palace. These all gave me a bowing acquaint- 
ance with Shakespeare characters, though for 
some time, two or three years perhaps, the 
“Midsummer Night’s Dream” was the only 





Chiron: and Jason p 27% 


From TANGLEwoop TaLes For Boys AND Girus, 1852. 


rx 

ho ae 

3 
o,. 


Ret 





A MID-CENTURY CHILD 73 


play that I really read. The portraits of the 
great actors, Kemble as Hamlet and Mrs. Sid- 
dons as the Tragic Muse, in the ‘Gallery of 
Pictures” fascinated me and made me wish 
to know more about them and their lives. 
I had not been in a real theater more than 
three or four times, but I loved the stage 
and anything about actors, always reading 
over and over the advertisements of plays at 
the theaters in Boston, knowing the names 
and who acted in them. The first life of 
anyone that I ever read, except perhaps Ab- 
bott’s “Josephine,” “Madame Roland” and 
“Marie Antoinette,’ was a book that has 
never lost its charm—Mrs. Mowatt’s ‘“Auto- 
biography of an Actress.” I was interested 
in her life in the old French chateau, the plays 
acted by the large family of children there, 
and later in New York, the runaway marriage, 
the happy country life afterward, and the 
play-acting that had been a pleasure and a 
recreation for the young wife and her sisters 
turned into a means of support when her hus- 
band lost his fortune. 

Among the Sunday afternoon books were 
volumes of the London Art Journal that had, 
besides copies of a great many early Victorian 


74 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


pictures and statues of no great merit, some 
old Italian masters and more from Van Dyck, 
Reynolds, Gainsborough and Turner. With 
them and the Cunningham Gallery as com- 
panions, it was like going home to go into 
the National Gallery and find the Titian 
“Bacchus and Ariadne” and the Rubens ‘‘Cha- 
peau de Paille,” besides the Hogarths that I 
had read of and the Turner “Ulysses and 
Polyphemus” that I had seen on a wall in a 
house where I used to go as a child. These 
Art Journals had all kinds of miscellaneous 
information—pictures from English history 
like Ward’s “James II Hearing of the Land- 
ing of the Prince of Orange,” Dr. Johnson in 
Lord Chesterfield’s waiting room, Hogarth’s 
portrait of Garrick and his wife, some of 
Thornbury’s scenes from the lives of English 
artists, and articles about Nuremberg and Al- 
brecht Diirer, with Longfellow’s “foamy foun- 
tains” of St. Sebald’s shrine, the burghers, 
Hans Sachs and the view of Diirer’s grave. 


“Emigravit” is the inscription on the tombstone 
where he lies; 

Dead he is not, but departed, for the artist 
never dies. 







AP 
CY HN 
a\\ 


\\Y \ 


$ tte ‘ 
ont WTA), Geom | i iataael 


Because she was so good a girl, 
The little girls and boys; 
Presented her a Christmas box, 

Brim full of Pretty: Toys. 
( a|/Vv|Ww/ Xx) 


A page from 
Tue Story or Littitz Kats: For a Goop Girv. 








A MID-CENTURY CHILD rare 


This was the beginning of an interest in Diirer 
and his work which has grown with the years. 
In one of my books—‘Country Life’”—there 
was a story called “The Adventures of a Pin.” 
At one period of its existence this pin had 
lived in a house where the family read aloud, 
among other books, “The Heir of Redclyffe.” 
This made me want to read it, too, and I 
found in it allusions to La Motte Fouqué’s 
“Sintram.” JI soon discovered that it was 
founded upon the idea of Diirer’s Knight rid- 
ing on undismayed by Death or the Devil, and 
it was a great pleasure to renew and extend 
my acquaintance with him through some of 
the woodcuts, and later through a book of his 
drawings and color sketches in the British 
Museum. It was, I think, my interest in the 
stage, in Garrick and Mrs. Siddons, and in 
Ward’s pictures that led me to a somewhat 
intimate acquaintance with eighteenth-cen- 
tury London, its men of letters and the actors 
who made it famous. 

Charles Reade’s “Art, a Dramatic Tale,” 
which Ellen Terry made familiar to American 
playgoers as “Nance Oldfield,’ was at that 
time published in weekly installments in the 
Liberator, an Abolition paper, and I remem- 


78 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


ber the vivid picture of the eighteenth-century © 
stage and the “Rival Queens,” Roxana and 
Statira, acted by Mrs. Bracegirdle and Mrs. 
Oldfield. 

I can date my first reading of a novel by 
the place where I read it. When the little 
sister, seven and a half years to a day younger 
than I, was a few weeks old I was left with 
her and my mother, with instructions to call 
someone if they needed anything. As an in- 
ducement to be very quiet ‘“The Lamplighter,” 
then new, was given me to read. The woes 
of little Gerty, her years in the old part of 
Boston when the kind lamplighter took her 
home, her life with the Grahams after his 
death, her journey up the Hudson, her heroic 
conduct and the romantic ending to the tale 
made a deep impression on me. 

It was in the summer of the same year that 
I fell down a steep flight of stairs and, as a 
consolation for aches and bruises, was offered 
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” I read it so many 
times that when I later heard Mrs. Stowe’s 
son tell “How Uncle Tom’s Cabin was Built,” 
repeating some of the scenes almost literally, 
I found so many of the phrases familiar and 
like household words that I could have helped 


AND HER BOOKS 79 


him if his memory had failed and told many 
things that he omitted. I could have de- 
scribed the cake that Aunt Chloe invited 
George to share, the difficulties thrown in the 
way of Haley starting in pursuit of Eliza, the 
scene at the senator’s and in the Quaker fam- 
ily and just how Cassy and Emmeline’s hiding 
place in Legree’s garret was made and fur- 
nished. 

About this time I began to go to school. 
My mother had taught me to read and write 
and spell, besides a little arithmetic and geog- 
raphy, but with four children she had her 
hands full. So my brother and I were sent 
to a small, private school in a large, low, 
sunny room of an old-fashioned house, up 
whose yard we could go at recess to a black- 
smith’s shop and watch him shoeing horses— 
a never-failing pleasure. I can smell my 
school reader now! There was an odor about 
the printer’s ink that always remained in it. 
It was “The Gradual Reader” with which I 
was already familiar in the older edition that 
my mother had used at school. Hers ended 
soon after “Thomas and his Little Sister,” but 
it included the little girl with whom I have 
always had the deepest sympathy—‘“The Bad 


80 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


Seamstress.” Our friends Rollo and Lucy 
were in the book and “Self Denial’: 


“T should like another, I think, mother,” said 
Frank, just as he had dispatched a large hemi- 
sphere of mince pie. 

“Any more for you, my dear Harry?” said his 
mother. 

“If you please. No, thank you, though,” said 
Harry, withdrawing his plate. ‘For,’ thought he, 
“T have had enough and more than enough to 
satisfy my hunger, and now is the time for self- 
denial.” 


One of the poems, “The Pretended Morning 
Drive,’ was by Mary Howitt and a great 
favorite. I have found it recently in Mrs. 
Forbes’ “Favorites of a Nursery of Seventy 
Years Ago.” Others were less cheerful. “The 
Little Graves,” for instance, and 

I like it not—this noisy street, 
I never liked, nor can I now. 


In the additions to the later edition was: 


‘There once was a man who contrived a balloon 
To carry him whither? Why, up to the moon. 


And years and years afterward when I climbed 
up from Salisbury to see where Old Sarum 
once had been, it was not on account of Sid- 


iii ts 


miyonndoneteaesseyi(| 
7 
! 





©The Se, Cs Ze. 


From Prince Dorvs. 





AND HER BOOKS 81 


ney Smith’s famous Rotten Borough article, 
but for the sake of the milestone: 


“Twelve miles to Old Sarum, 
To Andover, nine 


that undeceived the man when he thought he 
was in the moon. 

After “The Gradual Reader” had been read 
through, the next step was to Swan’s “Gram- 
mar School Reader.”’ Up to that time I had 
not known much about poetry, barring 
Mother Goose and other infantile jingles, the 
poems in “The Gradual Reader” and Mrs. 
Turner’s ‘Daisy’ and “Cowslip” verses in 
reprint; but this book opened a new world. 
Here was “The Deserted Village,” “The Pet 
Lamb,” “The Butterfly’s Ball,” “The Winged 
Worshippers,” “The Shepherd and the Philos- 
opher,” “The Needless Alarm,” “Extracts 
from Beattie and Byron,” Wordsworth’s ‘‘Fi- 
delity” and the poem that made the deepest 
impression of all, with long lines, solemn 
diction, and a wonderful choice of words— 
Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” 
whose opening stanzas I remember learning 
for the love of the sound of them. The story 
of “Eyes and No Eyes,” too, appealed to a 


82 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


dawning sense of out-of-door beauty, and 
“The Boy without a Genius,” ‘Alexander 
and the Robber” and “Charles the Second 
and William Penn” have never been for- 
gotten. 

I have spoken of Wordsworth’s “Fidelity.” 
Somewhere, somehow I had found and liked 
better Scott’s version of the same tale, “Hel- 
vellyn.” It may have been in “Youatt on the 
Dog” or “The Dog and the Sportsman”—from 
which I learned every breed and every disease 
of dogs—but I think that I first saw it in Anna 
Cabot Lowell’s “Gleanings from the Poets.” 
The melody of it always haunted me. When 
later on I heard an Englishman answer 
“Catchedicam” to the question, ‘What is that 
mountain?” that we saw from Dunmail Raise, 
and an American girl said quickly, “He is 
making fun of us, he made up that queer 
name,” I knew that she had never read over 
and over: 

But meeter for thee, gentle lover of Nature, 

To lay down thy head like the meek mountain 

lamb; 

When, wildered, he drops from some cliff huge 

in stature, 

And draws his last sob by the side of his dam; 








‘98 


£3} FOROS 
VOOR 





Fretfulness at Play. 
Go, naughty Ann, O go away, 

You know you've not been good, 
You've not been happy whilst at play, 
And, heedless what your sisters. say, 

I don’t see how you should. 





SAY OAD 2 OA LO CA OOAMYS CUES 


‘If little girls will peevish get, 


| And quarrel whilst at play lz 
If they will learn to pine and pet, I; 


To grow dissatisfied and fret, : 
This is the only way, 


. SE SE EE a ES : : © 


A page from 
RHYMES FOR THE NurszErY, 1837. 


Be 
: 





A MID-CENTURY CHILD 85 


And more stately thy couch by the desert lake 

lying, 

Thy obsequies seen by the gray plover flying, 

With one faithful friend but to witness thy 

dying 

In the arms of Helvellyn and Catchedicam. 
The book had been passed on to Jenny by 
an older sister, who being a Young Lady and 
going to Evening Parties, had no more use 
for school books. I used to borrow it when 
lessons were done to find a poem to repeat 
or to lose myself in the pages. They had a 
wide range, from “Busy, curious, thirsty fly” 
to “The Ancient Mariner.” The poem that 
I loved best was Lockhart’s “Lamentation for 
Celin.” I cannot look at the book now with- 
out seeing the mournful procession at the 
Vega Gate and hearing the slow tread of the 
horses, the wailing of the black-veiled sisters, 
the beat of the muffled drums, the shriek of 
the old nurse, all lamenting for “Granada’s 
darling knight,” lying dead with black crusted 
blood on his armor. 

We had some dearly loved books that some 
older cousins had outgrown, books of the early 
forties. Among them was “The Crofton 
Boys,” “Masterman Ready” and “The Fairy 


86 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


Cabinet”—a, little book bound in blue, trans- 
lated from some of the ‘Cabinet de Fées.” 
It had “The Blue Bird” and “Finetta Cin- 
dretta.”’ The two lines that the Princess says 
to the bird, 


Blue Bird, thou of Time’s own hue, 
Haste thee to thy mistress true, 


are in no other edition. There were, too, 
some volumes of Parley’s Magazine, with 
Miss Leslie’s “Week of Idleness” and stories 
of the boyhood of noted men. Knowing “The 
Crofton Boys” it was a great pleasure, long 
years afterward, to look out of the upper win- 
dows of a hotel just off Fleet Street and see 
“the leads” and watch the steamers going 
by on the Thames. One of the cousins’ books 
was, aS I remembered it, a volume of Cole- 
man’s Magazine, but I tried in vain to find 
it under that title in the Boston Public 
Library. In it were Tennyson’s ‘“May Queen,” 
“Piping down the Valleys Wild” and Hunt’s 
“Abou Ben Adhem.” There were riddles, too, 
and puzzles, Hawthorne’s “Daffy-down-Dilly” 
and some other good stories. I did not get 
a copy of it until one Christmas, when a 
children’s librarian several hundred miles 


(N 
A S 


a 5 Vt! 


a 


Lag im 
~~ 
: Ze 





From Tue History or JonnNy GILPIN. 





= 
. A 
is 
4 +) "4 
; * ait 
1 f 
{ 
“ 
y 
ef 
i 
% 
; 
r 
« 
s 
‘ 
x 
o 
' 
‘ 
s 
r 
ioe 
4 





A MID-CENTURY CHILD 89 


away, who knew nothing of my search for the 
magazine, sent me a package of old books 
that she could not use and among them was 
my old friend, bound under the title “The 
Boys’ and Girls’ Annual.” 

A school reader with a green cover and a 
sheepskin back came also from the cousins. 
I do not remember the title nor the name of 
the compiler, but I do recall that in it I made 
acquaintance with three famous poems— 
“John Gilpin,” “The Battle of Blenheim” and 
“The Cataract of Lodore.” What a “train- 
band captain eke” was I did not know, nor 
did I ask, for I had a way of keeping to 
myself whatever puzzled me, but Cheapside 
and Islington were two more of the places 
which I must see in London, and I had firm 
faith that Lodore was always doing every- 
thing that Southey said. Fortunately this 
faith has never been disturbed, for, instead of 
trickling over bare rocks as some travelers 
have described it, the cataract when I saw 
it was behaving even better than in the photo- 
graphs, pouring masses of white foam into 
Derwentwater. 

Not far from the slave seats in the gallery 
corner of the old, square, white, slender- 


90 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


steepled church where Theodore Parker had 
preached for several years in the days when 
some of the Brook Farm used to listen to 
him every Sunday, there was a bookcase 
which must have held two or three hundred 
volumes, the library for the Sunday School, 
which was open on Sunday mornings every 
year from May to November, not in winter 
from the difficulty of heating the church in 
the early mornings. There were in it, as far 
as I can remember, no memoirs of children 
who died young—indeed I never saw one until 
after I grew up. My especial favorites there 
were two fat volumes, “Howitt’s Tales’ and 
“Howitt’s Stories,” in one of which the hero- 
ine had for tea “hot pikelets,”’ which I after- 
ward found in Derbyshire. Another, “Little 
Coin, Much Care,” was more real than ever 
when I saw the half-burned ruins of Notting- 
ham Castle. The best of all was “Strive and 
Thrive,” the story of a widow and her chil- 
dren who kept a little shop in London. The 
daughter, who had learned to make designs 
for wall-paper, had one of the designs stolen 
and later identified by a mouse peeping from 
behind an acanthus leaf that she had sketched 
in the British Museum. 


t ¥ » ; fe ; 


; 





Goody Two Shoes so clever, 
She set up a School, 

To arise with the skylark, 
Was always her rule. 


From Tue History or Goopy Two Suoss, 1852. 





A MID-CENTURY CHILD 93 


In our village street was a large house 
where two sisters used to live, in an atmos- 
phere of old-fashioned elegance. Going into 
the hall, with its crimson-carpeted winter 
parlor on the south, its blazing fire with the 
ladies sitting before it with little screens to 
shield their faces, was like walking into a 
book. So was the entrance in summer into 
the north parlor, cool and dark, with a green, 
mossy carpet and the portrait of the Beautiful 
Lady in low-necked, crimson velvet dress and 
gauzy scarf, with her hand on a stair rail. 
She kept her beauty, even when her hair was 
white, and with it her love of books. Her 
room upstairs was fairly crammed with them, 
and a bookseller in town had a standing order 
to send her whatever was best worth reading. 
She was very generous, too, in lending and 
in giving to her friends. I have several books 
of later years with her name in them, that she 
passed on tome. One day she lent me a vol- 
ume, not new, that she thought would please 
a bookish little girl. It was the first edition 
of Drake’s poems with “The Culprit Fay,” 
which I read with great delight. The music 
of the verse, the descriptions and the fairy 


94 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


tale all combined into a new and charming 
whole. At another time she gave me Henrik 
Hertz’s ‘King Rene’s Daughter,” a romantic 
little play of much sweetness which has been 
a role to more than one great actress and is 
still a favorite with amateurs, a play entirely 
innocent and idyllic. 

One day I found in our attic a shabby old 
copy of “Pickwick” in two volumes. I read it, 
then “David Copperfield,” which I have yet, 
incomplete and with covers dropping off after 
being read many times by every member of 
the family. ‘The Christmas Carol” was read 
in school once by one of the teachers as a 
consolation for a hoped-for half holiday that 
was not granted. Not long after, the Beauti- 
ful Lady lent it to me in the first edition with 
colored plates. 

I got my first idea of an English dramatic 
performance, the Christmas mumming play, 
from the Warner sisters, whose novels and, 
later, children’s books, are crammed with 
theology and sickly sentiment. Their “Mr. 
Rutherford’s Children” is full of an old-fash- 
ioned fragrance and shows the happy, well- 
ordered life of two little sisters in their uncle’s 
country house. In ‘Carl Krinken and His 





From Tur ToKEn, 183 





4 a 4 
Hao G ae ee 2! 
1 eg J A 4 
ait , a vi rm y 
h ee ‘ 
e ; { v 
a y 
- 1 o “ 
. 
' i 
* 
PS PP hae 








AND HER BOOKS 95 


Christmas Stocking” every one of the simple 
presents given by a poor fisherman’s wife to 
her little boy tells its own story to him. The 
stocking itself describes a Christmas Eve in 
an old English manor-house, where the village 
mummers act the St. George play, with the 
words quoted nearly in full, much like Mrs. 
Ewing’s “Pace Egg,” which I have used for 
a Settlement Christmas play. I am sure that 
I should never have thought of acting it if 
it had not been for the scene I used to love 
to read over and over, the entrance of the 
mummers before the old Squire and his fam- 
ily, and the valiant Saint who 


- Fought the fiery dragon and brought him to the 
slaughter, 

And saved a beauteous Princess and a King of 
England’s daughter. 


In the thirties and forties, among many 
annuals for grown-up readers, were a few for 
children. In an odd volume of “The Annual- 
ette,” one of the cousins’ books, was a colored 
frontispiece of the Arctic bluebird, and the 
opening poem was Alexander Wilson’s ‘“Blue- 
bird.” The descriptive touches in it are those 
of a keen observer and a nature lover: 


96 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


‘When Winter’s cold tempests and snows are no 
more, 

Green meadows and brown furrowed fields 
reappearing, 

The fishermen hauling their shad to the shore, 

And cloud-cleaving geese to the lakes fast 
are steering. 


When first the lone butterfly flits on the wing, 

When red grow the maples, so fresh and so 
pleasing, 

Oh, then comes the bluebird, the herald of 
Spring, 

And hails with his warblings the charms of 
the season; 


Then loud-piping frogs make the marshes to 
ring, 

Then warm glows the sunshine and fine is 
the weather; 

The blue woodland flowers just beginning to 
spring, 

And spicewood and sassafras budding together. 


Nature study was not in my school course, 
but I loved, and still love, the poem because I 
had been taught at home to watch for the 
first bluebird, to search for the first “blue 
woodland flowers” and to listen for the first 





CHILDHOOD. 


From FRIENDsHIP’s OFFERING, 1835. 





A MID-CENTURY CHILD 99 


peeping hylas and the honk of the wild 
geese. 

The “Annualette” was made up, for the 
most part, of translations from the French and 
German, the stories borrowed from Mary 
Russell Mitford, Mrs. 8. C. Hall or Mary 
Howitt; but this poem had a distinctly Amer- 
ican, even New England, note. 

A few grown-up annuals in the house were 
read over and over again. One was an odd 
volume of “The Token,” edited by 8S. G. 
Goodrich (Peter Parley) under his own name, 
with contributions signed by Mrs. Sigourney, 
Grenville Mellen, Miss Sedgwick and other 
names familiar to readers of magazines of the 
thirties. There was another even more de- 
lightful than this—‘‘Friendship’s Offering” for 
1835. It was in the English edition with 
really charming “embellishments,” a group 
called ‘‘Childhood” by Chalon, of a mother 
and her three little girls with a poem by Mary 
Howitt and, best of all, “The Brazilian Bride” 
to illustrate a highly sentimental and improb- 
able tale by Mrs. Norton. The poem that 
makes the book valuable to collectors is 
“Salzburg,” signed J. R., a poem whose sub- 
ject, illustration and signature meant nothing 


100 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


to me until I recognized it not many years 
ago in a volume of Ruskin’s collected poems. 
He was sixteen when he wrote this and two 
others, “Andernach” and “St. Goar,”’ pub- 
lished without illustrations in the same an- 
nual. 

Harper’s Magazine had been coming every 
month ever since I had begun to read. Ab- 
bott’s Napoleon (one of the children used to 
ask, “Why did Josephine always call him 
‘mona mi’?” pronounced as in the counting- 
out game) and Louis XIV, who was, to me, 
to be envied because he always had a roast 
chicken by his bedside in case he should wake 
and feel hungry in the night, were entertain- 
ing and full of pictures. Thomson’s “Sea- 
sons” were less amusing but quite as pictorial. 
The magazines had, besides, all kinds of mis- 
cellaneous articles, historical, descriptive, bio- 
graphical, from church festivals in Brazil to 
Benjamin Franklin walking the streets of 
Philadelphia with a roll under each arm. 
There were stories, too—a ghostly legend 
about one of the kings of Sweden that haunts 
me yet—Miss Manning’s “Household of Sir 
Thomas More,” a stray chapter or two of 
“Cranford” about the visit to Thomas Hol- 


AND HER BOOKS 101 


brook and his quotations from Tennyson and 
—think of it!—“Bleak House,” “The New- 
comes” and “Little Dorrit” coming out in 
numbers! Imagine reading them in a child’s 
way—the way of a child who has never yet 
got over the habit of skipping, but who gained 
an intimate acquaintance with the house of 
low ceilings and staircases with queer turn- 
ings, the kind, elderly guardian who made it 
a pleasant home for three young folks, with 
round-eyed Charley and the Smallweeds, the 
Jellybys and the Turveydrops and the Old 
Girl’s birthday. Is there a better opening for 
a child into the world of music and art than 
that chapter in “The Newcomes” where Miss 
Cann plays on the old, cracked piano and the 
sickly, almost deformed J. J. translates the 
sounds into forms, knights in armor, splen- 
did young noblemen, banditti and lovely 
maidens? It was to Harper’s Magazine that 
most of the Americans of that day owed their 
knowledge of John Leech, his hunting 
sketches, his pretty English girls, his mus- 
tache-growing boy or whiskered young officers, 
his Frenchmen and his dogs. For every 
month for several years, just before the fash- 
ions at the end, there were two pages of 


102 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


“Selections from Punch,” an inestimable gift 
to readers in the United States. What a joy 
it was to find in my grown-up years a friend 
who had kept the old, bound volumes, and 
knew by heart the Leech pictures, the stories 
in The Editor’s Drawer and Porte Crayon’s 
“Virginia Illustrated.” 

My first knowledge of Washington Irving 
was through the Darley outline illustrations 
to “Sleepy Hollow,” with all their humor and 
life, and perhaps through an extract from 
“The History of New York” in one of the 
readers. One day there was a thunder shower, 
and as I did not enjoy being kept in a room 
with shut windows and preferred standing at 
an open door, I was beguiled into forgetful- 
ness of heat and lack of oxygen by the offer of 
Irving from the grown-up bookease. It was 
the double-columned volume that opened 
“The Alhambra,” the gate with the hand hold- 
ing the key, the magic tower, the mimic bat- 
tle, the Arabian astrologer and the Christian 
maiden down, down in the caverns. It 
opened, too, the touching, tender story of 
“The Rose of the Alhambra” and “The Lady 
of the Fountain,” the journey of the Rose to 
the same cavern and the tale of “The Three 







































































7M 





THE SPOTTED DEER. 


Frontispiece to 
Snow-Berries, A Book ror Youna Fouxs, 1867. 





A MID-CENTURY CHILD 105 


Princesses.” I never stopped to ask if the 
words were long or the style was prolix, but 
read, read, read until the sky was clear and 
the sun shone. I had found a treasure, and 
I went on to “Bracebridge Hall,’ the Old 
Christmas chapters in “The Sketch Book” 
and “The Tales of a Traveller.’ Even the 
gruesome story about the student and the 
guillotine was a mine of fearful pleasure, only 
equaled by “William and Helen,” Scott’s 
translation of Burger’s “Lenore” and his 
“Frederick and Alice,” with their ghosts, skel- 
etons and demons. I was not yet ready for 
Scott’s long poems, but I had, I think, read 
“The Bridal of Triermain,’ and I know that 
I loved one of the dramas which nobody reads 
nowadays—‘The Doom of Devorgoil,” with 
its adaptation of the tale of the ghostly bar- 
ber in Musaeus’ “Dumb Love,” that I have 
told to children at Hallowe'en. 

Under the eaves of our house was a large 
box covered with wall-paper and full of old 
magazines. Godey’s and Graham’s and the 
three numbers, all that were ever published, 
of Lowell’s Pioneer. What ghastly stories 
by Hawthorne and Poe, “The Telltale Heart,” 
“The Birthmark,” “The Oblong Box,” “Thou 


106 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


Art the Man” were in those odd numbers! 
There were milder tales, too, by Eliza Leslie, 
sister of Charles Leslie, the artist, who made 
use of her early life in England in a tale 
called “The Manderfields,” the experience of 
an American family in London not long after 
the Revolution. It described an amusing 
evening spent by the children at a party given 
by their landlady, where her other guests were 
the valets and maids of great personages. It 
was not all a high-life-below-stairs atmos- 
phere in which the children lived, for they 
made another friend in the Park, an American 
who had taken the King’s side in the Revolu- 
tion and was an exile. Another of Miss Les- 
lie’s entertaining stories was of an English- 
man, a blustering, self-styled patriot, who 
with his family and a so-called Countess, said 
to have received her title from Prince 
Charlie’s widow, the Countess of Albany, 
quartered themselves for months upon a hos- 
pitable American family, and were at last in- 
duced to make a moonlight flitting by a hired 
man who caused them to believe that the 
house was an Inn, and that their host was 
on the point of sending them a large bill for 
board and lodging. 


AND HER BOOKS 107 


Another story, “The Centre Table,” has 
half a dozen reminiscences that are valuable 
as studies of social life in Philadelphia from 
1800 to 1840. There is a ball, a children’s 
party about 1800 and a young housekeeper’s 





From 
GRANDMAMMa’s Book or RHYMES 
FOR THE NuRSERY, 1841. 


trials. The most tantalizing of Miss Leslie’s 
tales was “Amelia, or a Young Lady’s Vicis- 
situdes,” because the first numbers were miss- 
ing and I never read them until a few years 
ago when our library came into possession of 
a set of Godey. Amelia was the daughter of 
an innkeeper of German descent in what, a 


108 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


hundred years ago, was the West—Ohio or 
Pennsylvania. She was adopted by a child- 
less couple who died suddenly without pro- 
viding for her. She had received the usual 
education of a rich man’s daughter in the 
thirties, and did not know what to do to sup- 
port herself. Her father, hearing of her for- 
lorn situation, sent her brother to take her 
home, where she was very wretched on ac- 
count of the vulgarity and greed of the fam- 
ily and their attitude toward her adopted 
parents. The brother, the only other member 
of the family who had good instincts or man- 
ners, was in business in another town, and 
when his employer’s wife and daughters in- 
vited Amelia to visit them, her sister accepted 
the invitation, because she was older, and 
made herself heartily disliked. Of course the 
story ended well, like most stories in those 
days. And, even though one swain left 
Amelia when she was no longer a supposed 
heiress, another who had long loved her took 
his place. 

Old-fashioned and stilted as the stories are, 
they have a certain descriptive and satirical 
power. A note which I have in Miss Leslie’s 


AND HER BOOKS 109 


spidery handwriting gives a good idea of her 
character. 


Miss Leslie hopes to complete the article for 
Mr. Graham by next Tuesday afternoon, when he 
will please to send for it at five o’clock. It will 
probably occupy six or seven pages of the Maga- 
zine (perhaps not quite so much) but it will be 
well to have sufficient space reserved. 

Miss Leslie thinks it best that she should not 
be announced as positively a monthly contributor, 
in case she should not be able to finish articles 
regularly. It will be well that the public shall 
understand that all the sketches she writes for 
the Lady and Gentleman’s Magazines are remi- 
niscences of real facts, without any mixture of 
fiction. 


A portrait of Miss Leslie in Godey’s, with 
smoothly banded hair, a bonnet trimmed with 
lilies of the valley and a portfolio labeled 
“Sketches” is the typical “Authoress” of the 
forties. 

Some of the old Harper two-columned, red- 
brown, paper-covered novels were in our attic. 
A very modern woman who had just read 
“Jane Eyre” for the first time described it 
to me as the tamest novel she had ever read. 


110 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


She should have read it as one of my school 
friends did, by a dim lamp when she was 
alone in the house, or as I did in the attic 
with the rain pouring on the roof. 

Novels of another kind in the box were 
Frederika Bremer’s “Home,” “Neighbors” and 
“The President’s Daughters.” The first was 
within a child’s comprehension, the different 
types of character in a family coming within 
the range of one’s own experience and ob- 
servation—domestic Louise, sunny Eva and 
the others. But best loved of all was Petrea | 
with her large nose, her awkwardness and her 
literary ambitions. One strong bond of sym- 
pathy with one of the friends of my later 
years has always been that we both knew by 
heart Petrea’s story of Annette and Belis, who 
finally surmounted all obstacles to their love, 
were married, lived henceforth in a cottage 
surrounded with roses and had eight chil- 
dren in one year, and that Louise’s “water- 
gruel” gown had passed into the family speech 
and was used to describe any garment of pale 
or trying color. Another mid-century book 
that will hold its place is “John Halifax,” 
which I read during a six weeks’ quarantine 
and remember with great pleasure. 





1s 


THE BEANSTAL 


From JACK AND 





AND HER BOOKS 111 


All the school children nowadays know 
something of Longfellow, even if it is only 
“Paul Revere’s Ride,” “The Children’s Hour”’ 
or “The Hiawatha Primer.” When “Hia- 
watha” was published, as I needs must look 
into every new book that came into the house, 
I opened and read it. “Evangeline” and “The 
Building of the Ship” were also in the book- 
case, and I read them at about the same time. 
A little later I got a great deal of pleasure 
out of Longfellow’s two prose romances, one 
of which—‘Kavanagh”—has all the fun that 
was in the poet, reminiscences of schoolboy 
pranks, of Portland as it was in his childhood, 
and extracts from his desultory and varied 
reading. His “Hyperion” gave me an outlook 
on German poetry and romance. I had read 
a few of the translations in “Gleanings from 
the Poets,” but “The Black Knight,” the stu- 
dent songs, the merry Heidelberg University 
life, the glimpses of Bettina Brentano, “The © 
Boy’s Wonder Horn” and “The Golden Jar” 
all excited in me a desire to learn German 
and see Germany and the Rhine. 

A very different book that I loved was Hor- 
ace and James Smith’s “Rejected Addresses,” 
which no one reads nowadays. It had de- 


112 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


licious parodies on the poets of 1810 to 
1830 in the form of addresses for the open- 
ing of the Drury Lane,—Wordsworth, Scott, 
Southey, Byron, Coleridge very cleverly imi- 
tated, and some verses of pure, rollicking non- 
sense or burlesque, like “The Stranger,” which 
I was to remember a little later when I read 
“Pendennis.” 

At this time a new edition of the Waverley 
Novels was coming out, two volumes a month, 
and I remember the growth of the collection 
in the bookcase. I was told that I might read 
the stories—an empty form, for I used to read 
everything that interested me without regard 
to permission. At first the long, uneventful 
opening to “Waverley” did not look attrac- 
tive; but an extract from the end, the execu- 
tion of Fergus Maclvor, that I found in the 
American First Class Book, led me to read the 
whole. I was drawn to “Ivanhoe” by a pic- 
ture in one of the old Annuals and a dimly 
remembered story in another wherein Row- 
ena’s sea-green kirtle and Rebecca’s “simarre” 
appeared at a fancy ball. 

After the spell was once upon me, I read 
every one of the novels, some of them many 
times over before I was fifteen. The Lowland 


AND HER BOOKS 113 


Scotch, which I had learned from Burns, 
made the Scotch stories easy. The long 
poems, as I have said, I did not read until 
I knew many of the shorter ones and some 
of the novels. As a child I went to the old- 
fashioned grammar schoolhouse in the town 
for a few months, and the first noon-tide that 
I spent there I found in the school library 
the beginning of “The Lay of the Last Min- 
strel,” and read the rest at home with great 
delight. I did not know “The Lady of the 
Lake” until I had seen an illustrated copy 
at a neighbor’s house, although the poem had 
been on our bookshelves all the time. I re- 
member that I made out the old English of 
Sir Tristram in our edition without much 
trouble, and that Tristan and Isolde were 
old acquaintances when the Wagner operas 
began to be the fashion. 

Mrs. Jameson’s “Poetry of Sacred and 
Legendary Art,” “Legends of the Madonna” 
and ‘Legends of the Monastic Orders” came 
into the house at about the same time as the 
Waverley Novels and, though they were early 
editions in the original pale blue cloth with 
palms and crowns on the covers, we were al- 
ways permitted to read them, and got a good 


114 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


deal from them—the lives and legends of the 
saints which have made all Christian art and 
symbolism full of story and meaning. 

_ Ackermann’s Repository published extracts 
from the Waverley Novels. The stories in 
it were neither better nor worse than in 
other magazines of that period; but it gave 
me not only the graceful, well-drawn fashion 
plates of the time, but color prints of Italy 
and Switzerland, and some of Rowlandson’s 
drawings for “Dr. Syntax” and “Sentimental 
Travels in the South of France” that taught 
me to recognize his style. The deaths of 
George III, Queen Charlotte and the Princess 
Charlotte within two years caused the publi- 
cation of a ghastly picture of the Royal Vault 
at Windsor, with all the coffins on shelves. 
Most of the fashion plates then were of court 
mourning. More cheerful pictures were of 
the celebrated Vienna pack of cards, now 
found in collections, with a story running 
through them, and of a “hobbyhorse,” the 
forerunner of the bicycle. 

I began to read the Atlantic with the first 
number. The stories that led me out farthest 
into literature and history were Harriet Pres- 
cott Spofford’s, with their sumptuous style 


AND HER BOOKS 115 


and their allusions to poetry and drama, and 
Rose Terry Cooke’s “Sphinx’s Children” and 
“Metempsychosis.” There was no English 





I had a little hobby horse 

And it was dapple-gray, 
His head was made of pea-straw, 
His tail was made of hay. 


From 
MorHer Goosr’s Nursery RHYMES 
Oup STYLE. 


course in our high school, but the Atlantic 
taught me the use, correct, and incorrect, of 
many words. 


At fifteen I had what it is possible for every 


116 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


child who lives in a town where there is a 
public library to have, an intimate acquaint- 
ance with Dickens, Scott and Irving, some of 
Thackeray’s novels, some Longfellow and Ten- 
nyson and Shakespeare’s comedies. Some 
chance words spoken by the teacher with 
whom we were studying Voltaire’s “Siécle de 
Louis XIV” set us to reading Macaulay’s his- 
tory, and gave us a good working knowledge 
of the England of 1700. 

Good magazines for boys and girls began 
in the sixties. The first was Our Young 
Folks, published by Ticknor and Fields and 
edited by Lucy Larcom, assisted by John G. 
Whittier and J. T. Trowbridge. Harriet 
Beecher Stowe wrote the opening story, 
“Hum, the Son of Buz,” an account of a hum- 
ming bird that strayed into her conservatory 
in the rain one day, apparently near dying. 
It recovered with good care, made itself en- 
tirely at home, and lived there for several 
weeks, taking short flights and coming back, 
until one day it appeared exhausted and died. 
Then there was the Riverside Magazine, 
edited by Horace Scudder, and remarkable for 
its good pictures and interesting stories. It 
published several of the ‘‘Bodley Books.” In 
one of the early volumes Lucretia Hale told of 


AND HER BOOKS 117 


“The Lady who put Salt in her Coffee” and 
introduced the Lady from Philadelphia. Mrs. 
Adeline Whitney wrote “Leslie Goldthwaite” 
for “Our Young Folks” and followed it with 
“We Girls.” Some of Edward Lear’s nonsense 
poems and some deliciously funny stories by 
Dickens were in the later volumes. 

The influence of books that I read over and 
over between the ages of five and fifteen has 
been so great upon my later life, its tastes 
and pursuits, that in the last twenty years I 
have collected copies of as many of them as 
possible for a standard of comparison with 
what children read now. They have come 
from second-hand bookshops, from. attics, 
from booksellers’ catalogues and from friends 
breaking up housekeeping and as careful to 
find a good home for every old book as if it 
were a cherished cat. Some of my own have 
always been in my possession. Others that 
had been given to a Sunday school library 
were brought back after they had been dam- 
aged by fire; I promised a new volume for 
every old one found. 

The collection, small at first, began to grow, 
thanks to three second-hand book dealers 
near by, and to lists from other cities. It is 
not an antiquary’s library, for there are only 


118 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


a few books in it of earlier date than 1800, 
and the most expensive one that I ever bought 
was a little more than five dollars. Once in 
a bookseller’s window I saw some old friends 
brought from the basement and offered for 
sale at five cents each. They included Tom 
Thumb, Dame Hecket and an instructive Jack 
Horner telling the sources of the “ingredients 
chief,” like “sugar and beef,’ the “currants 
all black from the Island of Zante” and “the 
many nice things of which his mince pie was 
made.” It is hardly necessary for me to say 
that I bought a copy of every one that I could 
remember, and one or two more for good 
measure. 

It is not easy to find colored picture books 
in good repair, but they sometimes come un- 
expectedly to a collector from attics of city 
houses which are to be pulled down to make 
room for business blocks, or from carefully 
preserved relics of some country childhood. 
No one excepting a collector knows the rich 
and interesting “finds” in country houses 
where several generations of a family have 
lived; but they are not always willing to show 
their hoards, or—if they do exhibit them— 
they ask fabulously large prices. Many of 
my old-fashioned books have been given me. 


AND HER BOOKS 119 


Nearly a hundred years ago a motherless little 
girl was sent from Philadelphia to school in 
Hartford, where she stayed until she was mar- 
ried. Her father used to send her books, usu- 
ally tales with a moral, illustrated by steel 
engravings. They were kept by her descend- 
ants until they built a house a little out of 
town, when they gave them to me. They are 
interesting, because early in the last century 
Philadelphia issued more books for children 
than any other city, and Mary kept hers in 
excellent condition. 

Richard Hengist Horne, a friend of Eliza- 
beth Browning and author of an almost for- 
gotten poem called “Orion,” wrote for chil- 
dren under the name of Mrs. Fairstar—‘‘The 
Memoirs of a London Doll” and “The Doll 
and Her Friends” told by the doll herself in 
a charmingly simple and natural manner. 
The descriptions of the toymaker’s attic, the 
confectioner’s shop with the Twelfth-cakes, 
little Ellen’s hard life at the milliner’s, the 
doll’s change of residence, the London Parks 
and the Christmas Pantomime all aided in 
making London as real to me as Boston. Mr. 
Horne wrote another book at about the same 
time, called “The Good-Natured Bear,” which 
I wished very much to read, but never saw 


120 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


until I grew up. Then I found it among some 
books that a friend of mine had kept from 
her childhood. It was years later when I was 
asked in a bookshop to go into the basement 
to see some interesting books that were for 
sale. Almost the first one that I saw was 
“The Good-Natured Bear”! I did not scream 
for joy, but I said something that made the 
salesman ask if I had seen a mouse! [I said 
no, but that I had found a book that I had 
been hoping for years to own. It had come 
from the library of James T. Fields, and was 
and is in excellent condition. 





Ride away, ride away, 
Johnny shall ride, 


From 
Moruer Goose’s Nursery RHYMES, 
Op STYLz. 


PETER PIPER’S 
ALPHABET 


THE FOLLOWING ALPHABET 
IS REPRODUCED FROM 


PETER PIPER’S PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES 
OF PLAIN AND PERFECT 
PRONUNCIATION 


FACSIMILE EDITION, PUBLISHED BY GRANT RICHARDS, 
LONDON, 1902. 


\ 
AN 


Vv 
How. 
. =< 





ieee) 


ANpDREW AirPUMP ask’d his Aunt her Ail- 
ment: 

Did Andrew Airpump ask his Aunt her Ail- 
ment? 

If Andrew Airpump ask’d his Aunt her Ail- 
ment, 

Where was the Ailment of Andrew Airpump’s 


Aunt? 
123 


124 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


Bb 


Billy Button bought a butter’d Biscuit: 

Did Billy Button buy a butter’d Biscuit? 

If Billy Button bought a butter’d Biscuit, 

Where’s the butter’d Biscuit Billy Button 
bought? 


CNG 


Captain Crackskull crack’d a Catchpoll’s 
Cockscomb: 

Did Captain Crackskull crack a Catchpoll’s 
Cockscomb? 

If Captain Crackskull crack’d a Catchpoll’s 
Cockscomb, 

Where’s the Catchpoll’s Cockscomb Captain 
Crackskull crack’d? 


AND HER BOOKS 125 





Davy Dolldrum dream’d he drove a Dragon: 

Did Davy Dolldrum dream he drove a 
Dragon? 

If Davy Dolldrum dream’d he drove a 
Dragon, 

Where’s the Dragon Davy Dolldrum dream’d 
he drove? 


126 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


oie 


Enoch Elkrig ate an empty Eggshell: 

Did Enoch Elkrig eat an empty Eggshell? 

If Enoch Elkrig ate an empty Eggshell, 

Where’s the empty Eggshell Enoch Elkrig 
ate? 


Eo@ 


Francis Fribble figured on a Frenchman’s 
Filly: 

Did Francis Fribble figure on a Frenchman’s 
Filly? 

If Francis Fribble figured on a Frenchman’s 
Filly, 

Where’s the Frenchman’s Filly Francis Frib- 
ble figur’d on? 


AND HER BOOKS __ 127 


Gaffer Gilpin got a Goose and Gander: 

Did Gaffer Gilpin get a Goose and Gander? 

If Gaffer Gilpin got a Goose and Gander, 

Where’s the Goose and Gander Gaffer Gilpin 
got? 


fm: A 


Humphrey Hunchback had a Hundred Hedge- 
hogs: 

Did Humphrey Hunchback have a Hundred 
Hedgehogs? 

[If Humphrey Hunchback had a Hundred 
Hedgehogs, 

Where’s the Hundred Hedgehogs Humphrey 
Hunchback had? 


128 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


I 1 
Inigo Impey itched for an Indian Image: 
Did Inigo Impey itch for an Indian Image? 
If Inigo Impey itch’d for an Indian Image, 
Where’s the Indian Image Inigo Impey itch’d 
for? 


Jumping Jacky jeer’d a jesting Juggler: 

Did Jumping Jacky jeer a jesting Juggler? 

If Jumping Jacky jeer’d a jesting Juggler, 

Where’s the jesting Juggler Jumping Jacky 
jeered? 


AND HER BOOKS 129 


\e, ~. ANS 4 
18 DA x K 





SS \ 
ANS) 


i ik 


Kimbo Kemble kick’d his Kinsman’s Kettle: 

Did Kimbo Kemble kick his Kinsman’s Ket- 
tle? 

If Kimbo Kemble kick’d his Kinsman’s Ket- 
tle, 

Where’s the Kinsman’s Kettle Kimbo Kemble 
kicked? 


130 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


Loa 


Lanky Lawrence lost his Lass and Lobster: 

Did Lanky Lawrence lose his Lass and Lob- 
ster? 

If Lanky Lawrence lost his Lass and Lobster, 

Where are the Lass and Lobster Lanky Law- 
rence lost? 


M m 


Matthew Mendlegs miss’d a mangled Mon- 


key: 

Did Matthew Mendlegs miss a mangled 
Monkey? 

If Matthew Mendlegs missd a mangled 
Monkey, 


Where’s the mangled Monkey Matthew 
Mendlegs miss’d? 


AND HER BOOKS 131 


IN 


Neddy Noodle nipp’d his Neighbour’s Nut- 
megs: 

Did Neddy Noodle nip his Neighbour’s Nut- 
megs? 

If Neddy Noodle nipp’d his Neighbour’s Nut- 
megs, 

Where are the Neighbour’s Nutmegs Neddy 
Noodle nipp’d? 


@© 6 


Oliver Oglethorpe ogled an Owl and Oyster: 

Did Oliver Oglethorpe ogle an Owl and 
Oyster? 

If Oliver Oglethorpe ogled an Owl and 
Oyster, 

Where are the Owl and Oyster Oliver Ogle- 
thorpe ogled? — 


132 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


eg 


Peter Piper pick’d a Peck of Pepper: 

Did Peter Piper pick a Peck of Pepper? 

If Peter Piper pick’d a Peck of Pepper, 

Where’s the Peck of Pepper Peter Piper 
pick’d? 


Q 4q 


Quixote Quicksight quiz’d a queerish Quid- 
box: 

Did Quixote Quicksight quiz a queerish Quid- 
box? 

If Quixote Quicksight quiz’d a queerish Quid- 
box, | 

Where’s the queerish Quidbox Quixote Quick- 
sight quiz’d? 


AND HER BOOKS 133 


K - £ 


Rory Rumpus rode a raw-bon’d Racer: 

Did Rory Rumpus ride a raw-bon’d Racer, 

If Rory Rumpus rode a raw-bon’d Racer, 

Where’s the raw-bon’d Racer Rory Rumpus 
rode? 


Ss 


Sammy Smellie smelt a Smell of Smallcoal: 
Did Sammy Smellie smell a Smell of Small- 
coal? | 
If Sammy Smellie smelt a Smell of Smallcoal, 
Where’s the Smell of Smallcoal Sammy 

Smellie smelt? 


134 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 


te 

Tip-Toe Tommy turn’d a Turk for Two- 
pence: 

Did Tip-Toe Tommy turn a Turk for Two- 
pence? 

If Tip-toe Tommy turn’d a Turk for Two- 
pence, 

Where’s the Turk for Two-pence Tip-Toe 
Tommy turned? 


U 


Uncle’s Usher urg’d an ugly Urchin: 

Did Uncle’s Usher urge an ugly Urchin? 

If Uncle’s Usher urged an ugly Urchin, 
Where’s the ugly Urchin Uncle’s Usher urg’d? 


AND HER BOOKS 135 


Wey 


Villiam Veedon vip’d his Vig and Vaistcoat: 
Did Villiam Veedon vipe his Vig and Vaist- 
coat? 
If Villiam Veedon vip’d his Vig and Vaist- 
coat, 
Where are the Vig and Vaistcoat Villiam 
Veedon vip’d? 


W w 


Walter Waddle won a walking Wager: 

Did Walter Waddle win a walking Wager? 

If Walter Waddle won a walking Wager, 

Where’s the walking Wager Walter Waddle 
won? 


136 A MID-CENTURY CHILD 





XYZ ae 


X Y Z have made my Brains to crack-o, 
X smokes, Y snuffs, and Z chews tobacco; 

Yet oft by X Y Z much learning’s taught; 
But Peter Piper beats them all to nought. 











GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE 


LL 


3 oa nob Lindel 








